alt Hacker News> Millennial fathers have roughly tripled the amount of time they spend with kids.
I think this really undersells it. My mom parented a few hours a week. My kids (like most) lived under ceaseless 24/7 adulting. The time I spent with my sons was more like a 20x increase over my parents' generation.
Past that, it seems like it's taking forever for anyone to notice the radical changes in modern parenting/childhood. Along with eliminating adult-free peer time, we've eradicated free range areas. My generation could roam (w/o adults) for miles in every direction; my kids (like most) could go from one edge of the yard to the other (credit: car culture, trespassing culture, false stranger-danger culture).
The surprising part (to me) isn't how thoroughly adults have sabotaged kids growth opportunities, it's that nearly no one seems to have noticed it.
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We’ve also eradicated the unsupervised peer socialization that kids experienced with the free range. It’s common for a child these days to only ever be around other kids in very supervised environments with adults present (play dates, school, organized activities).
Spending long chunks of time with no adults, in a large mixed-age group, is a less and less common experience.
I spent some time in a remote fishing village in Madagascar and that was one of the things that surprised me the most - kids would spend all day together in an unsupervised mob roaming around the village, from the youngest ones who were just old enough to walk independently to age 8-10 or so (older than that and you had things to do).
I also enjoyed this essay on the topic: https://unpublishablepapers.substack.com/p/where-do-the-chil...
I’ve noticed that people don’t notice when the kids are free range anymore, because they’re all connected to an international network and pinging their location every minute.
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Millennials on the whole are incredibly neurotic about all kinds of things. Why that is is a matter of debate.
> nearly no one seems to have noticed it.
I'm very curious how much time you spend talking about parenting and consuming either social media or professional content about parenting, because those topics are so deeply embedded in parenting today that it's like saying "nobody seems to have noticed the internet".