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Comment by dividefuel | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this as the main factor (over cost) for the falling birth rate. The opportunity cost of having children has never been higher: you give up leisure, hobbies, rest, social life, and income. Whether or not children is worth this cost is a personal thing, but it seems kinda obvious that as the cost increases, fewer will pay it.

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> The opportunity cost of having children has never been higher: you give up leisure, hobbies, rest, social life, and income.

Those things are given up because parenting-time is up 20-fold from a few generations ago.

From the 1960s back, kids needed parents a few hours a week.

But we reduced kids' roaming area from many sq mi to just their own property. At the same time, we instituted 24/7 adulting. Most of those hours are filled by parents.

Kids have permanently lost daily hours of peer-driven growth - the ones where complex social interactions occurred naturally. Parents are now left with trying to construct artificial environments (leagues, programs) where maybe some of that can occur.

Those efforts eat time and resources. And they're a poor substitute for the vital environments that kids once had for free.

I spent 20x the time parenting that my mom did. For all of that, my kids had little-to-none of my growth opportunities.

I think it's a mistake to project changes in US society onto that in Japan. Kids there are still largely free range.

Yeah, also in Northern Europe. Here in Estonia kids as young as 5 years old even go to kindergarten on their own. They take a bus and are just fine. Seems to me the helicopter parenting is mostly a thing in the U.S.

Because in the US parents can get arrested if their children go out alone. It's a failure on their laws.

And of their infrastructure where everyone wants to have their own suburban kingdom with large back yard, swimming pool, garage for two SUVs and workshop.

Americans don't like living in small apartments like Europeans and Asians so this is what they get.

I grew up in the US with parents that had a suburban kingdom, large back yard, swimming pool, garage for three SUVs, and workshop: I walked to, waited for, and rode the bus to kindergarten.

"This is what they get" is false causation, these things have been present for decades. Helicopter parenting, liability for walking around alone, special snowflake treatment are all newly-introduced ideas.

The shift from roaming to restriction took place over generations and occurred unevenly.

A few generations ago, the trend was that US kids had a broad range of appealing places to roam and were generally free to do so.

Presently the US trend is that kids have few if any appealing places to go. And should they roam anyway, they and their parents risk legal (and increasingly permanent) consequences.

You must be quite young if you had SUVs when you were growing up. They didn't become popular until the late 1990s. They basically didn't exist at all in the 1980s or before; people had station wagons back then.

We did have Suburbans, Broncos and a Ram thing that was closed in. Not a ton of them but they were out there.

Very true. I see little kids by themselves frequently, on the subways, on their bicycles, etc. It reminds me of when I was growing up in the US decades ago, before helicopter parenting became mandated by law there.

I let my kids roam free here in the US (Columbia, MD), but the reality is that they don't want to because there are no other kids outside to play with.

> I let my kids roam free here in the US (Columbia, MD), but the reality is that they don't want to because there are no other kids outside to play with.

I suspect there are no other kids outside because there are few/no desirable places for kids to congregate - places that are safe from moving cars, enforced property laws and adults with poor judgment.

My neighborhood (Bryant Woods in Columbia, MD) is honestly perfect in this regard. It's filled with walking trails and playgrounds. Lots of green space.

The roads are also twisty & turny. They're difficult to drive fast on.

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