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Where do the children play?

(unpublishablepapers.substack.com)
409 points casca | 3 comments | 16 Nov 25 13:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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jiggawatts ◴[17 Nov 25 10:34 UTC] No.45952399[source]▶
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!

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1. johnnyanmac ◴[17 Nov 25 11:01 UTC] No.45952528[source]▶
>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.

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2. mlrtime ◴[17 Nov 25 11:53 UTC] No.45952825[source]▶
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.
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3. johnnyanmac ◴[17 Nov 25 22:18 UTC] No.45959028[source]▶
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.