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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

the component that is getting lost in our culture, which in other cultures is still more present is that grandparents play an active role in helping the young parents to raise their children. in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help.

when our first was born we moved to live a few km from the grandparents, and there was always someone nearby to help and to show us how things are done.

oh, and going with the theme of the article, great-grandpa from my wifes side was still around, but my son does not remember him now.

and as my dad was the youngest of 7 kids, i just barely remember his parents.

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> in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help.

Same for Indians. And 90% of Indian dramas are about mother in laws butting heads with daughter in laws.

Obviously, a daughter in law that earns sufficient money herself is not going to give up her agency, and many in laws who are expecting the deference they had to give their in laws when they were young are going to have trouble meshing with the new power dynamic.

But only 20% of Indian women are in the workforce, due to culture--family honor concerns.

It is due to those Indian women not having the opportunity to earn money. If you look at American women who are children of Indian immigrants, the rate is much higher, because women have a far easier time obtaining higher income jobs in the US (or UK/Aus/Can/other developed countries).

But that is rapidly changing amongst the upper classes in India too, almost everyone will support their daughter to get as good of an education as they can and secure as good income earning opportunities as they can.

Children of immigrants rapidly absorb the core culture of their new country. Especially when in grants them greater independence.

The upper classes in India are a rounding error, maybe the population of Spain at most.

Edit: you are right that it's a trade-off. In Bangladesh keeping women at home may mean starvation, so they are grudgingly allowed to work.

28% of Indian students are enrolled in higher education. The gender split is 52:48 in favor of males.[1] For the US those numbers are 39% and 45:55 (more women than men).[2] Since they're from different sources the participation rates might not be directly comparable shrug but the gender stats should still be applicable.

At least going by that, there doesn't appear to be a great deal of "lock your girls and women away" going on over in India.

1. https://opportunities-insight.britishcouncil.org/news/news/i...

2. https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-enrollment-sta...

Sure, they go to college. Which makes the low labor force participation rate even more of a tragedy for them and the country.

> in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help

That's a common mode. Another common mode in Chinese culture is that the young couple lives separately from their parents, and the child is raised by the grandparents, rarely seeing its parents.

> the component that is getting lost in our culture, which in other cultures is still more present is that grandparents play an active role in helping the young parents to raise their children. in chinese culture for example the young couple moves in with the husbands parents, and so grandparents are always around to give advice and help.

That's great if the grandparents are good people. Not so much if they aren't.

This retort is true of literally everything involved in raising kids.

Substitute "parents" "preschool teachers" "sports coach" &c. for "grandparents" in the sentence and it's still true for the domain for the children. It's true that with grandparents you have a maximum of 4 to choose from, but you might not have more than 4 preschools to choose from either.

The best part about being a mature parent is that you have much more control over how you raise your kids. No way in hell did I ever trust teachers, grandparents, coaches, etc. over my actual parents.

My parents were in their 30s when I was born. Their skepticism not only decoupled them from depending on people they didn't trust, but their perspective rubbed off on me and set me up for success. Older parents have no problem showing their kids the reality of the world early on.

Individualism is not a bad thing at all if only you could convince all these people stuck in the past. This world will fall apart if we don't focus on higher quality parenting from the actual parents. Since long ago we've been saying we don't want "kids raising kids". My parents weren't the only ones thinking this way.

Arguably you can chose other teachers and coaches and daycare

You have up to 4 grandparents to choose from (in the case where all 4 are still living, but separated).

What about crappy parents?

Exactly. That's the distinction. While you can chose other people in most roles for your kids, you cannot pick their grandparents.

Additionally, in generational cycles where you can maintain or exceed your parent's class status without moving away.

Whole swaths of the US don't have enough good jobs to maintain a middle class lifestyle for kids of middle class parents.

And parents are working longer as well, meaning that overlap is less likely to happen.

I went to my grandparents every Wednesday. My mom just retired, my kids are 12 and I didn't have kids until my 30s.

There's so much about life that has changed the fabric of families in the last few decades

you can't choose your parents obviously, but having parents so bad that you don't want them in your life is not the norm. you have my sympathies if that is your experience.

for most people the problem is not that they don't want their parents around, but that the parents don't feel like helping as much as their kids would need it. and here the culture makes a difference.

my wife was not her mothers favorite. girls in china were always treated as secondary. and according to their tradition we should have been living with my parents. they favored their son and his wife in everything, and yet they did what they could to help their daughter, because that is simply what what grandparents in china do regardless of how well they relate to each other.

but in our culture it's not, and whether grandparents are willing to help varies a lot, and it depends on the relationship to their kids

> That's great if the grandparents are good people. Not so much if they aren't.

This is specious. If they are particularly awful, their kid probably won't want anything to do with them raising his/her kids.

I thought you were going to say it for a minute there - the cultural component that you speak of that I feel is missing in our US culture during the younger years is 'duty'

I was also a mess in my 20s and i had a lot of growing up to do to prepare for kids. Yet. Even after kids, I didnt really grow up quickly enough until kids forced the issue.

Having kids and being responsible for someone else who is solely deoendent on you to have a shot at decent life is a monumental duty. I did not have this imprinted on me and I can see why. Our values today are very different from those of my parents and grandparents, and I think that's the big difference.

Im not sure how we lost that as a culture. Maybe its bad leaders (bill Clinton affair etc), loss of religion, loss of community time due to diminished economic opportunity locally (flyover states, most former industrial towns and even cities), economic migration to large metros breaking family ties, all certainly played a role.

it seems correct to say that duty was the slowly boiled frog in the pan, and it looks increasingly hard for the frog to jump out

> Maybe its bad leaders (bill Clinton affair etc

I would add to this the increasing speed and volume of news. I don't know whether today's leaders are truly worse so much as that were all just much more aware of their failings than we were in the past.

There are no secrets these days.

I also think there's an aspect of societal propaganda breaking down in the face of the internet. "Duty" is a clearly artificial term, people are only bound to it so far as they believe in it. Society has gotten less good at convincing people to believe they have a duty.

We also have a lot of infighting between political and cultural factions that ruins the sense of shared obligation underpinning duty. It's hard to feel a duty to someone Fox News or Reddit has been telling you to hate your whole life.

I personally think it stems from a strong focus on individualism in the western (and, increasingly, the wider) world. We're all taught to prioritise our own needs over those of others around us, and go it alone if necessary to achieve that.

well, i think it is or was more than duty. it was necessity because your children were there to take care of you in old age. (and i have seen that in action with the great grandfather of my kids)

and there is also a sense of purpose. with the same conviction that young people work to provide for their family, which is something they learn to do because everyone else is doing it, grandparents simply see their purpose as taking care of their grandkids. i think that's much more than just duty. its their reason to live.

this is in part demonstrated by the distraught reactions by the hopeful grandparents when there are no grandchildren coming. (based on one person sharing their experience with me)

The boomer generation in general kind of broke this social contract. Too busy being eternal teenagers.

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