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Comment by tmaly | Hacker News Reader

I would have thought that two parents working and not technology would have been the major contributor to loss of the community in early periods.

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Non working parents were major contributors to local communities.

I have noticed that community organisations now are far more dependant on retired peopke than they were a few decades ago.

Two parents working doesn't matter when the environment is safe. When I was a kid both of my parents did work but I was walking alone/with friends to my school and back and didn't need to ask permission to go outside play with others. And mind you, that was a time when kid kidnapping was stil a thing. Imo what changed is abundance of cars- look how many ppl a killed by them, how big the cars got, how many spacy these take, look how far away is everything in suburbs- you basically need a car to meet with someone, it's even worse than a village due to the lack of a grid design. Also, because of spreading many third places became unprofitable, others were buldozed to create parkings esp in us with parking requirements. The zoning played a big role too- a lot of businesses that attract ppl, make the environment safer with social regulation and creating social bounds- can no longer be created bc of zoning. When tech did appear - it's natural ppl switched, bc these did offer more options to socialize safely compared to real world

> I would have thought that two parents working and not technology would have been the major contributor to loss of the community in early periods.

I had one working parent and I had a community because I had places to go.

My 5 kids had 1 parent at home full time and zero community. For most hours they were trapped in a building with adults. Sometimes they were contained in some highly limited adult-made program. And that was what they had. Also most every other kid.

FWIW, that doesn't counter the GP's suggestion that changes to the community norm might have impacted the experience for everyone.

Your 1-parent childhood may still have benefited from having many other stay-at-home parents keeping an eye out the window an ear to street for kids who need attention, and likewise your kids childhood may have been more isolated for the lack of that, even with a parent staying at home for them individually.

Sometimes, it's not about the circumstances of one's own home so much as about the prevailing circumstances (and expectations) of the community as a whole.

> that doesn't counter the GP's suggestion that changes to the community norm might have impacted the experience for everyone.

We lived that community "norm" as part of a very immersive and busy religious life. We also lived it in modern times where kids moved from one adult-constructed environment to another.

The author's theoretical mental health magic didn't materialize. These kids weren't surrounded with spaces to go with their peers and develop the critical skills that arise when adults aren't available.

I had 2 working parents and a community. The perceived safety and walkability of an area has a lot to do with it. My parents weren't worried if they didn't see me from morning until dinner time (and obviously they had no way of getting in contact with me other than maybe phoning all the other parents - assuming we weren't off in a field somewhere).

If you had two working parents, but had "community", frankly I'd have to assume it was comprised of kids with homemaker parents, which doesn't count as a counterpoint.

> If you had two working parents, but had "community", frankly I'd have to assume it was comprised of kids with homemaker parents, which doesn't count as a counterpoint.

This is exactly it. The mental health we're looking for is the byproduct of a childhood spent with regular access to hours-long, adult-free peer time. It also reduces parenting from the stupidly impossible amount of hours we have now.

The community part we're trying to replace with religious spaces was when kids grew up surrounded by multi-generational households. Until the 1st ½ of 1900s, it was what we could count on neighborhoods, villages, settlements, etc being built out of.

Religion can't replace that. I know because my kids grew up in the ideal the author is has in his head.

I think it's a complex system, where it's not so much any one factor but rather the presence of so many different factors that each have a small impact and which together combine to have a big impact. So you could be right at the same time the article is right. Technology has become a great atomizing force in our society, from automobiles keeping us from talking to each other in traffic to cell phones keeping us from talking to each other at the store. Even online shopping atomizes us. And in the mean time, both parents basically have to be working all the time to keep paying for their lifestyle. All of this combined leads to isolated childhoods, and because we tend to keep the habits we learn as children, isolated adulthoods.

two parents working 40-60 hours a week.

if two parents worked 20-30 hours a week each, probably not as big a deal.

That's actually testable! Especially across countries and across time.

(I doubt it's a big deal. But we could get the data to at least look for correlations.)

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