Where do the children play?

Yeah 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!

> 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.

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...

I was an only kid that roamed pretty free as young as four, wandering the neighbourhood with similarly aged kids.

I chalk that up to the inertia of social behaviour. My parents grew up in a generation where they all had many brothers and sisters, and their parents were one of eight. They learned parenting from their parents, and I learned parenting from mine.

We adjust with each generation, but not completely.

>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.

> 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.

> Where are you getting that stat?

Basic population dynamics. For a population to remain steady, a breeding pair can only have on average two surviving children that procreate themselves.

If you want to get into the weeds, there's obviously some "fudge factors" that bring this a little bit up above two.

1. Not every kid that survives to adulthood will go on to procreate themselves, so the remainder need slightly more than two to make up the slack.

2. During periods of population growth, the average survivorship has to be higher.

3. The percentage surviving depends on how many were born per family to begin with. I didn't state a percentage, I said two. Okay, fine 2.4 or whatever, but not a fraction, that "depends" on too many variables.

> For the majority of human history the childhood mortality rate has hovered around 50% not 80%.

RECORDED history, which is a short blip in our evolutionary history as a species. I said megayears, a.k.a.: millions of years, for most of which we have scant evidence. Extrapolating from our wild animal cousins and just observing how these "uncontacted" tribes live, it's pretty obvious that for 99% of the time we could be called human, we had five+ kids per couple, and ten+ wasn't uncommon... of which two-point-something survived.

That's just the way it is, for essentially all species. It has to be, otherwise populations would explode in numbers until it's standing room only for the entire surface planet.

PS: Next time you watch some BBC documentary about some species giving birth to hundreds of offspring, well... now you know. They didn't make it. Certainly, statistically, most of them must not have, because if they could and did, then that species would have their population numbers grow astronomically fast!

PPS: You hand-waved away a 50% loss rate as if it's a detail. That in no way undermines my argument that if you have an only child, or even two or three, that losing half of them is not considered acceptable parenting in this day and age. There is absolutely no way anyone I know would trade half of their children so that they can have a wild, carefree, and unsupervised childhood like "nature intended"!

> losing your one child now?

You have likely not lived in a society where every family has many kids, so extended families have dozens of grandkids/cousins. It gets to the point that in times of plenty there's an "excess" and societies go to war in some sense just to see if they can carve out a bit of territory at the "mere" cost of some tens of percent of their youth. I mean.. why not? If you have half a dozen that "made it" and enough land for only two to inherit, flip the coin on the rest of them and maybe they'll find glory and conquer some new patch of land. Or not. What other option is there?

That's how people used to think and behave for millenia.

Modern life is very, very different to even just a couple of hundred years ago, let alone for most of human existence pre-history!

I read a statistic that before modern times something like 15%-60% of men died due to violence! For comparison, if you're an adult male in Ukraine, you've had about a 0.5% chance of death from violence, 30x to 120x safer in the middle of a war than during peacetime in pre-state tribal life.

I wish people would come up with examples that are more than 'Just look at Japan'. Japan is great, and I think we could learn a lot from them. However, their society is extremely homogeneous (98%+ ethnically Japanese) with deeply shared cultural norms that have been reinforced over centuries. This creates a fundamentally different trust environment than what exists in diverse, multicultural societies.

> That's just the way it is, for essentially all species. It has to be, otherwise populations would explode in numbers until it's standing room only for the entire surface planet.

Human population has been increasing for at least thousands of years. Our best estimates put the human population 30000 years ago to about 8 million people, at about 1 ad the population is estimated at about 200 million people, in the 17 hundreds the population is estimated at about 600 million.

That is not a stable population, that's a growing population. You also have to take into account pandemics, widespread violence, etc. The black plague killed 1/3 of the population of Europe, you can be pretty sure that the reproduction rate was above 2 both before and after the pandemic. Millions of people died when Europeans colonized the Americas again the population growth rate would have to be much larger after the event for the population to bounce back.

Additionally adult mortality before procreation does not factor in child rearing behavior. Because why would it?

And lastly all that is pretty much irrelevant especially the habits of prehistoric people, because the change in how Americans raise their children happened in the last 20 years. Not in the 1900s when child mortality went way down.

The thing that changed between the 80s and now was not the acceptability of losing children, what changed was how Americans in particular assess risk, the Satanic Panic of the 80s, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007, the revelation of how widespread childhood sexual abuse is (before the 90s it was estimated at about 1% of the population turns out it's over 16%), all of these factors made the American public incredibly afraid about their children safety.

It's not that people in the 70s and 60s were okay with harm coming to their children it's that they didn't believe harm would come to their children when they were with other children alone running around. Which by the way was mostly a correct assessment.

In Japan the fertility rate is 1.2 per woman and yet 6 and 7 year olds got to school on their own. Because the culture there believes that is a safe practice, mostly because it is.

Go watch Old Enough, obviously it's a television show exaggerated and not how life really works in Japan, the production team and the parents are essentially watching over the children, but it clearly demonstrates that the culture there expects children to roam the cities safely.

Oh and by the way on average preindustrial families had 5 to 7 children not 10 so 50% survival rate is 2.5 to 3.5. Which taking into account occasional widespread population collapses fits much better with the observed long term growth.

Focusing on Japan is a non-sequitr. This is pretty much all of Asia and half of the EU.This isn't unique to them. Japan was only mentioned because it's probably the first country to have needed to make national population crisis initiatives (as the GP wanted to suggest).

>deeply shared cultural norms that have been reinforced over centuries

Yes and Americans had this too, once upon a time. We did a good job tearing that down in the last 60 years to push consumerism instead.

It took 60 years to get there, we aren't going to fix it overnight. And that's also part of the problem. No one wants to put the time in for the effort.

Disagree. Kids in Japan go to school on their own since kindergarten. Many of them are the only children of the family. It's not about kids are "more precious" or not