alt Hacker NewsYeah well, we have one kid, and we're too old to have another. He's the only grandchild on both sides of the family. He has no cousins, first or second. That's apparently the new normal in many countries.
Of course he's going to live a sheltered life!
It's easy to tell parents to let their kids roam free, but that advice is to copy the behaviour of parents that had ten kids.
I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.
Does that make it sad that it's not like that any more?
Maybe. Maybe not.
If you want to change it, recognise that first, society and our very civilization would need to change back to the era of every family having half a dozen or more kids. Then, then you'd have to figure out what to do about the excess population: unsustainable exponential growth or mass child deaths. You choose!
Replies
> I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.
Where are you getting that stat? For the majority of human history the childhood mortality rate has hovered around 50% not 80%.
Back in the second century BC if you had 10 children you expected half of them to reach adulthood.
In addition I can't find specific stats but I would wager that the vast majority like 90% of those deaths happened at infancy. So it doesn't really factor in how they would be raised.
And as others have noted. We were free to run around as much as we wanted in the 90s and the average family had like 2ish children.
>our very civilization would need to change back to the era of every family having half a dozen or more kids.
Let's try improving public transportation, making more walkable communities, and encouraging independent exploration first. If those don't work, then sure. We can try the Shinzo Abe initiative to make big families.
Japan has had this issue for longer than the US, but it is not impacted the same way in terms of kids socializing.
What a take...so if you had 3 kids and lost one it would only hurt a third as much as losing your one child now?
Kids can play with other kids that are not in the family too...
> It's easy to tell parents to let their kids roam free, but that advice is to copy the behaviour of parents that had ten kids. I said "had", because on average, two of them will survive to adulthood and procreation. That's natural. That's the way things were for our species for megayears.
We still roamed pretty free as kids in the 90s. That's long after the decline of childhood mortality and large families - I don't know more than a handful of families from that era who had more than 2 kids.