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Parents now spend twice as much time with their children as 50 years ago

394 points by elsewhen 9y ago

tomc1985 9y ago
Probably because helicopter parenting is in vogue (at least in the US). It is seriously messed up that you can have CPS called on you for letting your kid wander freely in the neighborhood
- fleitz 9y ago
  And yet people wonder why children grow up to be completely unprepared for the world...
- jdhawk 9y ago
  “we’ve morphed from being a village that helps raise children to a parenting police state,” -Petula Dvorak https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-kids-and-our-parenting-police-state/2015/04/13/42c30336-e1df-11e4-905f-cc896d379a32_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-kids-and-our...
- thriftwy 9y ago
  I've read in some paper about Ice Cream Test: Whether your 7 years old can get to the corner store and back after buying an ice cream there without encountering any dangers such as traffic. Immediately thought that you could be jailed for that in some jurisdictions. Having said that, I think the number of people who let their kids free-range is decreasing everywhere unfortunately.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    In Japan, there is a tv show that secretly follows 4 or 5 year old kids on their first trip to the store alone. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9eMZp8KsZ5k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9eMZp8KsZ5k So free ranging is not decreasing in all countries, just a few.
  - ovulator 9y ago
    Corner store? You mean the Mega-lo-mart only accessibly after hopping on the free way?
    - btilly 9y ago
      Where I live my kids can go on a 5 minute walk through a quiet neighborhood then cross one street to get to McDonalds. If they go a different direction they wind up at Subway. In 10 minutes they can go to a wide variety of places, everything from IHOP to a dollar store. Albertsons is an 11 minute walk. Less if they run. More if they stop and play at the park on the way. Not all of suburbia is big box malls off of freeways. There are a lot of little strip malls around as well. And you can choose a place for how walkable it is.
      - logfromblammo 9y ago
        That's anecdotal. 10 minutes of walking won't even get you out of my subdivision. Plop down a 15-minute radius on my map and there are literally zero places of business anywhere in it. This is largely due to zoning. There is a strip of land zoned for local businesses a mere 10 minutes away, but unsurprisingly, no one has chosen to build anything on it. You can't always prioritize walkability if you have a limit on your housing budget. My current place costs $11k/year, and the commuting to work by car isn't entirely horrible. But walking anywhere is really out of the question.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      I live in a suburban neighborhood. We're near a number of stores and restaurants without crossing any streets, and the number multiplies if you allow a crossing or two. An actual grocery store is about half an hour's walk, but it's closer than the freeway, and you'd pass three or four convenience stores and about a dozen restaurants within the same distance. Getting to Mega-lo-mart would be a 45 minute walk, and involves going under the toll road overpass and crossing about 4 streets (so, a little farther than I'll want my kid going anytime soon).
  - tomc1985 9y ago
    There was always some stigma against free-range parenting (think the grocery store scene in Home Alone) but it's gotten much, much worse
    - astura 9y ago
      What we would now call "free range parenting" was normal until recently.
  - sitepodmatt 9y ago
    I think the word we're missing is pedophiles, we don't let kids roam far due to the increase fear of pedophiles - although I suspect the risk level havent changed as much as the publicity. Im probably better with traffic back then than I am now. Back in my day say when we were 9 or 10 so, we're be away from home for several hours at time during school holidays, sometimes we'd venture a little further than we'd admit to our parents - and bunk on a train to nearby city to cause a bit mayhem there etc.., we're try a get back before tea time incase the parents started calling each other and stories weren't solid. At age of 7 we certainly accustomed to the local shops and parks. I speak to parents now and the phrase often is 'the world is a different place' they mean there a new awareness of nonces. That's the unfortunate truth, of course there were still extremely cagey parents back then too, I felt sorry for those kids.
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  You won’t have CPS called on you for letting your children wander and play in the neighbor. Please don’t spread nonsense. Edited with my response to everyone depositing articles about the Meitivs: Nobody “called CPS on” the Meitivs. Somebody called the polic because they saw the children wandering around a parking garage (not a park like in many of the news stories. See [1].) The police officer then called CPS several times wondering what to do with children before finally driving over to CPS when they were dragging their heels[2]. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-family-again.. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-family-again.... [2] Not that I think CPS is great. As a teacher, it’s basically impossible to get CPS to do anything unless the parents are abusing the children right in front of you on school property. Part of that is CPS being overworked and underfunded/understaffed. Part of that is that is it still usually better to keep the kids with their parents instead of foster care. And part of it is CPS not having the resources to have more options besides arrest parents or do nothing (like offering social services to the parents). Also I would argue there is a difference between letting your children play in the neighborhood outside your house and just leaving your children at the park for hours. I have had students who haven been abandoned at the park with their younger siblings.
  - vamin 9y ago
    I know you're already getting a torrent of anecdotes right now, but I really think it's important not to sweep this under the rug. I have a co-worker who lives in a nice suburban neighborhood and had CPS called on him because his child was allowed to play in the park across the street from his house unsupervised. His child was interviewed by a social worker, his house was searched for drugs, the contents of his fridge were evaluated, and he had to go to court. In my state, it only takes one person to call, and once that person calls, an investigation is legally required, regardless of how spurious.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Depends on your neighbors and your neighborhood. Definitely not a universal, but it can fit an existential.
  - mankyd 9y ago
    "The Maryland parents accused of child neglect for letting their children roam freely had to retrieve their children from Child Protective Services after they were removed from a park Sunday by police." http://www.wusa9.com/news/local/silver-spring/md-free-range-children-taken-by-cps/203337260 http://www.wusa9.com/news/local/silver-spring/md-free-range-...
- aidos 9y ago
  Or maybe because fathers are much more involved than 50 years ago? There are probably a load of reasons and I don't think it's just helicopter parenting. My father in law never changed a nappy for any of his 3 children, and that was normal. It certainly isn't now.
  - dinoleif 9y ago
    Fathers can't be involved if they aren't around. Single motherhood rate in 1950: 5% Single motherhood rate in 2010: 41%
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      Fathers can be around without being married to the mother.
      - dinoleif 9y ago
        From a technical perspective sure. From a statistical perspective, the point is a distraction.
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        It's not, because unmarried long-term cohabitation has exploded.
        pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        How long term? As long as a whole childhood?
        astura 9y ago
        Unsurprisingly most unmarried parents break up before their kid is an adult. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-gaspard-msw-licsw/living-together-without-marriage_b_6520118.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-gaspard-msw-licsw/livin... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2004878/Unmarried-parents-6-times-likely-split-time-child-5.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2004878/Unmarried-pa...
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  Man that meme really went wild huh Yes, CPS in one state did something ambiguous and alarming to self-proclaimed "free range" parents. No, you probably don't have the full story that a guy who had never seen the children before was concerned about their safety in that part of town, he decided to call 911 instead of talking to the kids and coming off as a creep. Yes, that one town's police department did get the CPS' attention, and the CPS did an investigation and found something arbitrary which is rightfully concerning. No, this isn't indicative of the entire US culture or widespread neighborly paranoia about children walking unattended.
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    It sick in its own right that society has demonized talking to any children that aren't your own or in your care. Police should not have been called in that situation and just asking if the kids are ok or lost should not be viewed as a creepy action.
    - taeric 9y ago
      I'm torn. I fully agree with you. I also think quickly calling the cops to check on them as you go do something else shouldn't be that big of a deal. Because, to my mind, police should be part of the community. Ideally, not strangers in uniform. No, I don't think that is the case most (any?) place. :( I'm also afraid to look at the statistics, as I fear I'll see that this is another slant in class/race standings. :(
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        Indeed, if you do call the cops they should be able to send someone to speak to the children to check they're OK, make sure they've not absconded or something, rather than making an incident out of it.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    It's extremely unusual to see unescorted children where I live, below early teens or so. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to hear about someone calling the police after seeing a child outside on their own; that's just the current culture. I live in a small gated community, in among other ungated neighborhoods. I see kids playing around my neighborhood, but never leaving it on their own. I hear grumbling from some of my neighbors even about that.
- deleted 9y ago
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- junkscience2017 9y ago
  I can't get my kids out of the house. I try. All of their friends are on SnapChat and/or Steam games. No one leaves their rooms. It is really depressing. Kids are not getting fresh air anymore.
  - tn_ 9y ago
    How old were your kids before they got their smartphones/computers?
    - junkscience2017 9y ago
      in our area, most kids seem to be carrying iPhones by 4th grade. sad, but there it is.
      - ashark 9y ago
        My wife's a teacher. ~1/2 of the kids around here have smartphones by 2nd or 3rd grade, all but the children of "weirdos" (maybe 2-3%) have them by 5th. The schools don't make them leave them at home anymore like they did back when regular ol' dumb phones started to show up in kids' possession. Sometimes kids will be texting during class and it's their friggin' parents they're texting, as in, their parents contacted them during class. This is not as rare an occurrence as one might hope. Teachers can't confiscate them for practically any reason because most parents freak out if they do. No parental support for discipline basically = teachers can't do it (it's ineffective and a bigger headache than it's worth). This at lower- to middle-middle class schools, not the rich ones. And we're deep in flyover country, not anywhere trendy.
  - DoubleCribble 9y ago
    Mystery power outages that seem to hit only our house have been known to occur in my neighborhood on fine weather days. It's like a ghost in the breaker box or something...
    - conanbatt 9y ago
- acemv 9y ago
  Unlikely -- As a parent, I am regularly exposed to messaging from local, state and the federal government, public school system, healthcare professionals, and parental advice "experts" on the importance of family bounding and spending time with my children. I go out of my way to be more attentive to my children in the evening after work, and during the weekends. Their day to day lives are significantly more structured than my own upbringing. Perhaps the rise in family time is due to this decades long mass messaging campaign around the developed world. And I don't think this is bad! Why? This social response is natural response to the rise in use of social media, entertainment and other electronic distractions.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    The concerning thing, though, is the way we start demonizing and going after parents who are unable to do this because of, say, their jobs not making it feasible.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Can you cite some cases of that happening, preferably a pattern of said cases?
- gajomi 9y ago
  This seems improbable. Of course it depends a bit on the number of hours required to effectively helicopter parent, but the data for USA mothers indicates something like a 100% increase in time spent since 1965 resulting in two total hours a day, which seems far to little for any kind of omnipresence (similar results for fathers). Of course, these numbers are "on average" so you might argue that there are helicopter parenting subpopulations contributing to this increase, but this data can't provide evidence for or against that. The data in Denmark (where there really has been an orders of magnitude increase) and in France (with the decrease) seems like interesting places to look into. It could be that systematic reporting biases have a significant role to play in these results.
  - watwut 9y ago
    How do you count when stay at home mom (norm in middle class 50ties) does housework or reads/solves crossword while the kid is playing around and she is answering those "look what I done" requests? It is both speding time with kid and not spending time with kid.
    - gajomi 9y ago
      This is a very good question and would seemingly be implicated in a critical view of the reporting methodology. I have been impressed with the work the NYT data team shows on their github (or whatever). It looks like the economist has an account: https://github.com/economist-data-team https://github.com/economist-data-team but in a few minutes searching around couldn't find any links to data sources. There was a footer mentioning that you could read more on the marriage special report, but I encountered a paywall :)
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    You don't need to spend time with someone to micromanage them.
    - goialoq 9y ago
      Then micromanaging is not related to the OP research about spending time with them.
- rdtsc 9y ago
  Happened to co-worker. They don't even know which neighbor did it, but it resulted in embarrassment, including calls at work from police, home visits etc.
  - goialoq 9y ago
    What age was the child?
    - rdtsc 9y ago
      Maybe 2nd or 3rd grade. Playing in the front yard with parents watching from the house.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- nasalgoat 9y ago
  I think it is less in vogue than you imagine. Every single parent I interact with via my son's activities expresses a lot of distain for it and generally promotes free time for their kids. I think the tide is turning back to free-range parenting.
ashark 9y ago
1) What's the age range for children, here? All, 0-18? Something else? 2) Is this per kid or per parent? That is, do you get more "points" if you have three kids and spend an hour with all three than if you spend an hour with just one of them, or does it count the same? Per kid the latter'd be lower averaged over the three, per parent it's the same. Looks like it's per-parent but I'm not entirely sure. [EDIT] notably, if it's per-parent, this doesn't necessarily mean kids are getting as much more total time with their parents as it might seem. Mom spending an hour, then dad spending an hour separately, is 2 hours of kid-with-at-least-one-parent time, but both parents at the same time for one hour is two parent-hours of time but only one hour of time-with-at-least-one-parent for the kid. [EDIT EDIT] of course the other metric would be vulnerable to that too, I was sloppy. Point is I'd be curious how much time-with-any-parent for each kid went up over the same period.
- pchristensen 9y ago
  Per #2, families are much smaller on average now so even if they count that way, I don't think that would contribute much.
  - bertil 9y ago
    Related to families changing structure: what about step-parents?
    - ashark 9y ago
      Oh, relatedly, I wonder whether time in the care of non-parent adult relatives or friends-of-parents (i.e. not paid childcare or teachers) dropped substantially over the same time period.
- andreliem 9y ago
  Interested in the age range as well. Huge difference between infants, prek, k-middle school and beyond.
- ddeck 9y ago
  I believe this is the source for the article: Educational Gradients in Parents' Child-Care Time Across Countries, 1965–2012[1] It's behind a paywall, but the PR from the UCI study states: Study findings were based on the Multinational Time Use Study Harmonized Simple Files, which focused on parents between the ages of 18 and 65 living in households with at least one child under the age of 13 [2] [1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12305/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12305/full [2] https://news.uci.edu/2016/09/28/todays-parents-spend-more-time-with-their-kids-than-moms-and-dads-did-50-years-ago/ https://news.uci.edu/2016/09/28/todays-parents-spend-more-ti...
kelukelugames 9y ago
>One analysis of 11 rich countries estimates that the average mother spent 54 minutes a day caring for children in 1965 but 104 minutes in 2012. Men do less than women, but far more than men in the past: their child-caring time has jumped from 16 minutes a day to 59. I spend 100+ minutes every day changing diapers. Actually that's not true, most of my time is spent trying to put the stupid newborn to go to sleep. I thought paternity leave was going to be chill and maybe I can learn a new hobby, master javascript, or travel to Europe. Nope, more stress than day job. I think fatherhood is evolving too. My father's generation almost did nothing and that was acceptable. That is changing. One of the women in a dual income family says "Mom handles input, Dad handles output."
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- aidos 9y ago
  Who am I to judge, but it's paternity leave for a reason - and not so your "stupid newborn" can get in the way of learning a new hobby. EDIT it was a lot less like a joke originally. Apologies for the offense caused by missing that.
  - kelukelugames 9y ago
    I'm making a joke. :) Thanks for the feedback. I made the list more outrageous so it's more obvious. A lot of male comedians transition to family jokes after having children. This could be the catalyst for my stand up career!
    - strictnein 9y ago
      From personal experience, you will soon transition to making dad jokes. I do it daily. I'm hilarious (to no one but myself).
    - IncRnd 9y ago
      > A lot of male comedians transition to family jokes after having children. "dadmedians" Your kids will love hearing that about their dad, until they are older anyway and start to roll their eyes :)
baldfat 9y ago
The problem is that 90% of the time the parents are now on their phones. Seriously I find myself on my phone and not interacting with my kids at times and I am super sensitive about phones. I don't allow phones during meals, during family time and not when someone is talking with you. I break my own rules a ton :(
- cknoxrun 9y ago
  I've mentioned this before on here, but for me tossing the smart phone and getting a flip phone has utterly changed the dynamic with my children. It has been 3 months, and I am still amazed (although I guess I shouldn't be) that being actually present with them when we interact has seemed to reduce their neediness/anxiety and improved our relationship/bond. If you can, I recommend giving it a try.
  - el_benhameen 9y ago
    I want to do this, but my one hangup is the lack of a decent camera. I know that I probably don’t need to document my kid’s life as much as I do, but I do like being able to share moments with my own parents, who live a ways away. How did you handle this aspect of the change? Do you carry a dslr or point and shoot, or do you just go without (or have flip phone cameras improved a ton since my last one)?
    - Chickenality 9y ago
      Maybe just commit to removing the most attention-grabbing apps from your phone? Seems like a good way to keep the aspects of your phone that you value while getting rid of the ones that you don't.
      - alkonaut 9y ago
        Yeah a time schedule or a really long and cumbersome unlock password for social media and web browser would really help. But then you need that recipe for dinner and you think "this is stupid, I'm an adult, I can handle this" and you remove it.
justinzollars 9y ago
Wow! That's an amazing stat!
cmrdporcupine 9y ago
In my experience kids are spending less time with friends, and more time at home. So more time with parents. But is that a good thing? Is it quality time?
Troyboy 9y ago
How is this even possible when nearly all households requiring dual incomes?
- IncRnd 9y ago
  It's possible, because people don't work 24 hours a day and might choose to give up things like television or tablet use in order to spend time with their kids.
- TheGRS 9y ago
  That was my first thought, but there is also a huge increase in the amount of activities kids do these days, with also an increase in parental participation. Marginal gains over the years have added up. i.e. campaigns to spend time with your kids, PTA meetings, involvement with clubs and sports. I'm sure not all of it is positive (like extreme helicopter parenting), but for the most part it seems to be a good thing.
- nasalgoat 9y ago
  Weekends. Dad used to fiddle in the basement or go golfing, now he goes to soccer practice or the park.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    Did dad used to fix stuff in the basement, rather than "fiddle", everything now is made to break and be harder to repair than to replace ...
- Cd00d 9y ago
  I think it was an interview with Bob Newhart (maybe WTF), where he talked about how his dad was never home - instead he went to the bar and hung out with his buddies every night. The interviewer asked him why, and Newhart answered "I guess he didn't really like us very much" (sad, but with a funny delivery). But, maybe we have more "family" time between dinner and bed than previous generations? I don't know. It seems to me, anecdotally, that people tend to spend more time at home in front of tv in the evenings, as opposed to hanging out at bars, for example, than may have been the standard of the past. The pubs in my neighborhood don't have the daily regulars like on Cheers....
picodguyo 9y ago
It's interesting that reactions to stories about parenting are always default-negative no matter what. People are saying this stat just shows we are smothering our children. Had it been the opposite (half as much time), people would be accusing parents of outsourcing childcare.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  Negative responses trigger a greater emotional response, thus garner more attention and upvotes. The fact that negative content commonly reaches the top is just a side effect of the voting system, which reflects human psychology. As an aside, I think the rise of subreddits like r/wholesomememes and other purely positive subreddits on r/all was done intentionally to counter the rampant negativity on Reddit. I think it's great. I wonder what kind of cultural guidance systems the mods on this site have in place.
- azernik 9y ago
  But probably different people. Communities are very capable of holding conflicting viewpoints.
  - watwut 9y ago
    The point is, only angry and negative people voice their opinions and positively minded people don't. If you look at threads about something else, (say economy or politics) there are typically both optimostic and pessimistic people and even some discussions between those groups. When it comes to parenting and children, positive opinions are rarely heard.
    - rjzzleep 9y ago
      Honestly, if you want to make a point, you should work on the way you phrase it. > only angry and negative voice their opinions i.e. bad people > positively minded i.e. good people I know you probably didn't think about it that much. Personally, I could start a rant about toxic culture now, but I'll leave it at that. If you don't want to create an aggressive response, maybe refrain from calling people that disagree with you angry and negative. EDIT: here's a suggestion for a good way to phrase the actual meaning you might have been thinking about: People that are happy about the way something is, are less likely to complain about it. Yes, true, but that by itself doesn't make the thing either good or bad.
cylinder 9y ago
Less household chores to do these days, more time sitting next to kid refreshing Twitter
riazrizvi 9y ago
> [for men] child-caring time has jumped from 16 minutes a day to 59. I always wanted to spend more time with my own children than my father did with me. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who managed to pull it off.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Perhaps ... I've spent 12 hours today with my kids, all but the first hour-90 minutes of their day (excepting school time for the schoolies; about 5 hours in the same space as them). I didn't read the article but is this effect coming from father's doing more time as stay-at-home parents? [FWIW we're dead poor financially at least in part through choice to have lots of contact with our kids.]
  - balabaster 9y ago
    After spending 12 hours with my kids, they would spend about 6 of those fighting with each other and me pulling my hair out and wanting to bash their heads together because they can't see their way past their rage for the other's existence. No matter what I try, they just cannot accept that each other have free will to do as they please and that isn't always going to coincide with what they want and they need to learn to be okay with that. 12 hours straight with them is like putting all of us in a torture chamber. They're angels when they're apart, but put them in the same room together for more than 20 minutes and it's like the Blair Witch Project. By the end of the weekend, I find myself longing for Monday for them to go back to school and be separated from one another :D
    - riazrizvi 9y ago
      I grew up with a lot of teasing and fighting. I used that experience to train my own kids to get along. My approach boils down to a zero tolerance policy prohibiting early abusive interactions. The type of ‘joking and playing’ that is really abuse-with-a-smile that inevitably ends in tears. I’m simplifying though. Over the years family friends have repeatedly commented on how well they get along (they are 11 & 13 now) but I just see the byproduct of strict training. And it hasn’t stopped, because as they age and make new friends, they develop new mean spirited habits.
nicholasjarnold 9y ago
I don't have any peer reviewed studies to point to here, but I do remember reading about both the stagnation of middle-class incomes and the rising cost of childcare in recent years. If you take those ideas as fact and couple them with the people commenting on the 'parenting police state' it makes sense that we're seeing an increase in time spent with children. Will this increased parenting time lead to humans that are better or worse prepared to cope with and thrive in the world after leaving the nest?
- bunderbunder 9y ago
  I'm not prepared to dig up any articles right now, but a lot of child psychologists seem to be worried that it will make children worse off in the long run. All that constant parental contact inhibits their learning how to be independent.
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    Out of all the people I know, those who seem to worry about everything they encounter were all trained in psychology or sociology.
pwinnski 9y ago
> One analysis of 11 rich countries estimates that the average mother spent 54 minutes a day caring for children in 1965 but 104 minutes in 2012. Men do less than women, but far more than men in the past: their child-caring time has jumped from 16 minutes a day to 59. So that's 70 minutes combined up to 163 combined, or a 133% increase, more than double. The ratio used to be 77/23, and is now 64/36, mothers/fathers.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  > So that's 70 minutes combined up to 163 combined, or a 133% increase, more than double. That's only true if parents are never together when they spend time with their children.
bkovacev 9y ago
I wish I had more solid evidence to call bs on this, but from my real world experience this is far from the truth.
verifex 9y ago
I was going to initially say something about child-care, but then I read the article and saw that men child-care time was previously 16 minutes a day in 1965, and now is up to around 59 minutes. That actually seems like a positive trend; at least from a holistic and common-sense point of view. It seems pretty strange that the men would spend such little time with their offspring. Now, we need a study to see what affect men spending more time with their offspring is having on them and society in general.
- jaclaz 9y ago
  I guess it depends greatly from the "business or trade" of the parents, beyond the periods. Personally (and in the '60's) I had the great fortune of having both mom and pop working "on their own", (and not in a factory, in a public office or similar) so basically after school I went to either my father's studio or to my mother's laboratory, until I was 12 or so I made there my homeworks, or played there. Even if it wasn't time "dedicated" to me, as they were anyway at work doing their jobs, one or the other parent was always present, at the most in the next room. I could see the difference when compared to my friends/classmates (of course not their or their parents' fault) which had parents that went out in the morning and came back home only in the evening, due to their job. A lot less communication between them and parents, and a lot less "experience" on what happens everyday in "adult's" life.
peeters 9y ago
OK I'll ask: what's the deal with Denmark?
- jessriedel 9y ago
  It really makes the data hard to believe. ~5 minutes per day of child care in 1965? Really can't conclude anything from this until we understand that number.
- luk32 9y ago
  Lol. I thought I'm the only one. We're they dispossessed of their children before or what? This kinda makes methodology dubious.
- ovulator 9y ago
  The study only had two data points for Denmark, and extrapolated the rest from that.
  - nkurz 9y ago
    I'm not sure if you are being serious or joking, but yes, this does turn out to be exactly the problem. The study only has data points for Denmark in 1987 and 2001, and the whole rest of the curve is extrapolated from the data from these two years. France, the other extreme outlier and the focus of the Economist article, is extrapolated from 3 years. The original graph at least tries to show error bars, but the Economist's "cartoon" helpfully omitted them. Theoretically, there might be something useful hidden somewhere else in the paper, but the graph that the Economist focuses on is rubbish.
robertwiblin 9y ago
"One of Galinsky's more surprising findings centered around a question she posed to both children and parents: "If you were granted one wish to change the way your mother's/your father's work affects your life, what would that wish be?" Some 56 percent of parents anticipated that their children would want more time with their parents and for their parents to spend less time at work, yet only 10 percent of the children actually wanted more time with their mothers and only 16 percent wanted more time with their fathers. A far larger proportion, 34 percent, wished that their mothers would be less stressed and less tired, and 28 percent wished this about their fathers." http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/05/listen_to_the_c.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/05/listen_to_the_c....
- sbinthree 9y ago
  This makes sense. I would much rather have less and more positive interactions with my parents than more or more stressful ones. Some people seem to have a "my parent was never around" complex but that usually seems to involve some combination of 1. Parent completely absent, not home at night, not reliable or away for extended periods working or 2. Parent missing key, meaningful events like the "dance recital" trope or 3. Parent outsources parenting to nanny and doesn't really monitor outcomes. If you are there for the important things, when you say you will be, and home for dinner (present, not just emailing on your phone) as often as you can be, that seems to matter more than working part time or other modern and progressive interpretations of being an engaged parent and with your kids.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    This. My dad worked 70 hours a week and travelled for work 30% of the time growing up, but we never felt “he was never around” because he made it to graduation events and little league and called us every day after school.
    - arbie 9y ago
      Things like frequent phone calls seen inconsequential, but: 1) They take significant dedication and scheduling on the part of the parent(s) and, 2) Have an outsize impact on the perception of your dependability. Huge from a kid's perspective.
callmeed 9y ago
Here's a few random guesses at causation: 1. Kindergarten redshirting 2. Most Kindergartens in the US now are half-day (EDIT: this is false) 3. Helicopter parenting 4. Family & Medical Leave Act ('93) + Longer maternity/paternity leave allowances by employees 5. An increase in single-parent households on some sort of welfare/assistance program (i.e. the single parent is at home and cannot work) 6. Increase in the number of parents allowed to work remotely from home Really wish they'd give more details on how these statistics were gathered, what age range we're talking about, etc.
- learc83 9y ago
  >Most Kindergartens in the US now are half-day The trend is towards full day Kindergarten not the other direction. More than half of Kindergarten programs are full day now, which is much higher than 50 years ago.
  - callmeed 9y ago
    My bad. At least where I live (California central coast), all public school Kindergartens are half-day. The only full-day options are private school.
    - rconti 9y ago
      When I was a kid, in the 80s, our public schools were half-day kindergarten as well (Washington).
      - amyjess 9y ago
        Same for me, in North Texas. Born in the '80s, went to kindergarten in 1990-91.
- jaymzcampbell 9y ago
  Bit OT, but I was unfamiliar with the term "redshirting" (apart from Star Trek connotations, which I assumed isn't what was meant :) For the non-US people: the practice of postponing entrance into kindergarten of age-eligible children in order to allow extra time for socioemotional, intellectual, or physical growth [1] I remember hearing something about this sort of thing over here in the UK. I was surprised to see this wasn't accepted policy [2] until as late as 2015. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirting_(academic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirting_(academic) [2] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/summer-born-children-to-get-the-right-to-start-school-later https://www.gov.uk/government/news/summer-born-children-to-g...
Romanulus 9y ago
Quantity != Quality.
teilo 9y ago
The amount of time parents spend with their children is certainly a factor in the well-rounded upbringing of a child, but it is a poor metric by itself. Children need parental involvement, parental accountability and discipline, and good parental examples to follow. If the latter two are lacking, the first is largely irrelevant.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Agreed with the proviso that it's not just "with" but "caring for". You can be with them and not engaging in any way. You can be caring for them without being directly engaged with them (eg supervising a playpark visit).
tzakrajs 9y ago
They don't specify the age of the children, but one reason might be that more young adults are finding it difficult to be employed thus spending more time with their family.
tempestn 9y ago
I found it very interesting how the change in time spent is so inversely proportional to the starting time spent in all cases. Every country that started low overshot every one that started high, and the lowest ended up highest, while the highest was the only one to decline. Some of that is explained by the bounds on time in the day, but certainly not all. Perhaps some societal backlash (or 'pendulum effect') to the extreme. Also interesting is that those trend lines appear to strongly suggest it will go considerably farther still.
juanmirocks 9y ago
Does this study also consider that children remain living at their parents' for longer and longer? For example, it is not bizarrely uncommon in Spain to find people in their late twenties or thirties still living with their parents.
otakucode 9y ago
This is a bad thing. Children are being straight up stifled and their ability to develop independence being actively and aggressively destroyed. We will pay a very steep price for this.
- komali2 9y ago
  I've been tossing this idea around actually. Gotta find some way to put my anthropology minor to use :P All unsourced speculative thoughts: So, traditionally, across all early human civilizations (including pre-ag revolution), my understanding is that kids weren't "raised" by their parents - everyone just kind of hung out in their villages, doing misc tasks/work, while the children ran free. The "raising" was done by the village as a whole, with the village elders taking an authoritative stance. Unlike in today's society, there isn't this massive, silo'd burden of ensuring a kid grows up sane / well adjusted / useful to society lumped onto two people who have literally never done it before and have to juggle the responsibility with as much as 8 hours a day or more of work to provide food/shelter for the kids. On average, these couples get about 1.5 "kids" worth of "raising kids" experience, and then that knowledge just dies off because they don't raise any more kids and don't really participate in the raising of their grandchildren. Compare that to a village where everybody is involved in raising kids, in particular the elders who might have seen tens of children growing and developing, from birth right up to adulthood. I guess my point is I'm not sure we're really doing "raising kids" in the best way anymore - I don't understand how it's acceptable that 1. Parents need to spend the majority of time away from children to provide food and shelter for the children 2. Two people with minimal "parenting" skills are entrusted with the raising of children from birth to adulthood EDIT: These thoughts apply to American white culture. Asian cultures still involve grandparents heavily in raising the child (grandparents raising the kids while parents are at work - I got my own issues with that as well but this isn't the place for it) and pockets of Black American neighborhoods where kids are raised by the community / large family units. (There's actually really great books written on how Black American kids grow up super socially adjusted, verbose, and confident because of how much time they spend hanging out with various adults)
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
kevmo 9y ago
How much time compared to 300 years ago?
megaman22 9y ago
I spent a lot of time with my parents. Lots and lots of time splitting wood, tinkering on equipment, toiling in the garden, working in the yard. At the time, I would have loved to spend less time with them.
- metaobject 9y ago
  Looking back, what about now? Overall, are you happy with the amount of time you did spend with your parents?
j_s 9y ago
Is there any evaluation of quality vs quantity? Technology adds more and more distractions, reducing effects of physical presence.
alkonaut 9y ago
"With" as in "nearby" or "with" as in "interacting with"?
linkregister 9y ago
This article is half-baked. How were parents spending less time with their children? Day-care facilities have greater attendance than ever. Were relatives watching the children? What age ranges were covered? Without more information, the graphs are meaningless. Maybe it's due to children having more unsupervised, outdoor play. Maybe it's due to relatives watching children more. If the age range is 0-5 years, the results are astonishing. If the age range is 0-18 years, then perhaps it's just a remnant of the shift from rural to urban populations, and the decrease of outside-the-home time by teenagers.
- astura 9y ago
  This is not surprising. When I was growing up kids mainly entertained themselves or each other the vast majority of the time. When I was a kid 99.9% of the time I did my own thing and didn't interact very much with adults. Now people want to entertain their kids all the time.
agumonkey 9y ago
I read patents
jknz 9y ago
iOS 13 and Android 11 future killer feature: When the user leaves work, turn off all email notifications as well as any notification from a non-family contact (including the addictive red "1" in the corner of app icons on the home screen). Turn it back on whenever the user is back at work or at 9 on the next weekday.
dailyvijeos 9y ago
It’s no surprise because helicopter parents also don’t have their priorities or common-sense in order.
gautamdivgi 9y ago
I’m definitely not an expert here but isn’t less time with parents a characteristic of the Industrial Age? Before that when movement across jobs was fairly static I believe the family craft would be passed down with the parents as teachers. I could be totally off the mark here but would definitely like to know more
deleted 9y ago
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SubiculumCode 9y ago
I don't have a subscription. Does the author consider the broader historical context? For example, on near subsistence agricultural societies, I imagine that families spend a lot of time working together, for example. Same with hunter-gathering, or even son-as apprentice trade crafts.
- roel_v 9y ago
  Somehow I don't think that tilling land with a baby strapped to your back would be counted as 'spending time with'...
  - SubiculumCode 9y ago
    I imagine herding the sheep or hunting deer with my son would qualify, or any of the other common tasks of agrarian and hunter gather societies.
creo 9y ago
Quantity over quality? There is "don't reinvent the wheel" stereotype in software industry, but it does not apply to other areas by the looks of it.
k__ 9y ago
I know many parents were at least the father started working more and often far away from their family. Sure they need more money with children, but how good is the money if you only see them on the weekend? Sometimes it sounds like an excuse so they don't have to hang around with them, but maybe I'm just bitter, because my father left me when I was 6 and even the years before I barely saw him :/
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  I am sorry for your experience, I hope you did/will overcome it and forgive him for this. There is huge power and freedom for you once you do, albeit it must be hard. I think children don't require huge amount of time, rather quality (100% focus) and often (ie 1 hour daily is much better than 7 hours at once 1x a week - effectively it should be much more though)
- balabaster 9y ago
  It's so weird how different our perspectives are given that my father too left when I was 6. Despite feeling some... I dunno, I guess a wish that I'd had a relationship with him. But I don't feel any bitterness or anger towards him. He did what was right for him and I can't fault him for that. Sure, it meant I didn't have a Dad and we now don't have a relationship because there was never time for that to grow, so that's a little sad, but I don't harbor any resentment for that. I'll have a pint with him if I see him, he's a nice guy, I like what I know of him, I see a lot of myself in him, but he may as well just be some other guy. We've probably not spent more than 6 months of time together in total since I was 6. I'll be 42 this year. It would be easy to harbour resentment for that, but what's the point? It doesn't serve any purpose, it won't change anything. It won't bring us closer together. It'll just make two people feel bad without any positive value.
  - k__ 9y ago
    Oh I don't resent him, he's just not a person I would like to spend time with. I just often think I'm generally bitter about parenting because of this.
nhumrich 9y ago
If this article is accurate (data source looks shady and lacking statistical significance) I believe it. I think for me, the main thing that would explain the increase is that you now have to watch your kid. What I mean is, when my parents were growing up, they would just wander the streets, hang out with other kids, and generally raise themselves. But now in days (at least in US) parent supervision is required for just about everything, and parents are afraid to let kids just go and wander (for good reasons).
- balabaster 9y ago
  No more good reasons than historically. The media is to blame for much of the hysteria around what we should be doing as parents. I would've gone out of my mind as a kid if I was raised the way parents are expected to inject themselves into every facet of their kids lives. I need my space, even when I'm in a relationship I don't want anyone injecting themselves in my space. Not my parents, not my partner, not my kids, nobody. If you never make your kids deal with being unsupervised and alone for periods, they will never be able to be alone, which will make them dependent on spouses and partners constantly for their emotional well-being. That is unhealthy for themselves and their partners. Obviously we can't know the consequences of society's overbearing and overzealous parenting "rules" until our kids become adults, but mark my words, they will come back to bite our kids in the asses if we don't give our kids room to breathe.
LeicaLatte 9y ago
Even if true, it was probably unintentional.
balabaster 9y ago
I think back to when I was a kid... My parents divorced when I was 6. Didn't really have a Dad to speak of until my Mum remarried when I was 14. That's a huge span of time for a kid to go through with one parent struggling to make ends meet. She worked hard and I'm sure she was stressed struggling to support 2 boys of 6 and 3. Work for her finished 3 hours after we finished school and there often wasn't an after school program to cover us so we would go to her office and help with photocopying and filing. I never recall feeling like she wasn't there. Even when she didn't have time to pay us attention, she was there. It never occurred to me as a kid that she didn't pay me attention. I was too busy paying attention to my own interests. She was home for dinner every night. She was the worst cook in the world back then, I laugh about it now, but you know what? She tried, fuck she tried. We turned out okay. She didn't poison us and now she's an amazing cook. I'd eat her home cooked meals over a restaurant meal any day of the week. She introduced me to reading at a young age. I'd read for hours, days and weeks with our only interaction being to call out spellings of words from my bedroom to the living room to ask what the word was, I have no idea what she was doing, only that she responded to my query. I'm thankful we had a small school and aside from a few troubled kids, most of us could say we were at least friendly if not friends. I could name every kid in that school and I knew all of their parents. We all knew at least half a dozen other parents we could go to if we needed something and long before school was out, most of us had adopted some other kids parents as our own and we floated between each others houses as if they were our own too. Did I spend a lot of my childhood longing for what I didn't have? A relationship with my father like "normal" kids. Sure I did. I still do as an adult. But it is what it is. I make damn sure that my kids never have to wonder if I care, or wonder where my priority is. I frequently work 12-15 hours a day, including weekends. But be sure, if my kids tell me they need me somewhere for something, I drop everything and I'm there. School events, plays, recitals, karate presentations, dinner and reading to them for half an hour at bedtime. It's important that kids have space to grow on their own. They need that. They may think they want you in their space all the time, but that breeds dependence on your approval and input into their thought processes. If you want to raise independent adults that have confidence in their own decision making skills, you need to get out of the way and give them room to make shit decisions and pick up the pieces while it's not going to kill them. Wisdom comes from experience, experience comes from making bad decisions and picking yourself up and trying again. If you bubble wrap them and protect them from every trauma you're scared of, they will never learn for themselves. I think if I analyze my childhood, my Mum probably spent only a fraction with us boys that would be seen as acceptable today, certainly much less than I give my kids, but in my eyes she did it right. She gave us the room to become strong independent men, able to stand alone and take on the world. She gave us just enough pride to make us feel like we'd earned it, but not enough to let it go to our heads. Able to make decisions for ourselves and deal with the consequences of those decisions and clean up our own messes. If I could rewind to my childhood and ask her to do anything differently, I wouldn't ask her to change a thing. She did good. The greatest thing I learned from her was that you don't need to panic about raising your kids. All you need to do is observe and listen. Your kids will tell you what they need. Give just enough, just enough to make them earn it. This way when they become adults, they will know how to make it on their own.
chrisbrandow 9y ago
As a parent of three kids 10-16, I can absolutely testify to the shift in the way my cohort parents compared to our parents. All the parents I talk to are keenly aware of the “over-parenting” dynamic, but it is very tough to break out of for “reasons”. There are a ton of subtle forces and dynamics that funnel everyone into these patterns. I still find it confounding however. I bet an enormous part of it is how unusual it is for kids <13 years old to walk places on their own. It really would stand out if your 11 year old kid walked a mile to school/store. Even though that was entirely common when I was a kid.

394 points by elsewhen 9y ago

tomc1985 9y ago

Probably because helicopter parenting is in vogue (at least in the US). It is seriously messed up that you can have CPS called on you for letting your kid wander freely in the neighborhood

fleitz 9y ago
And yet people wonder why children grow up to be completely unprepared for the world...
jdhawk 9y ago
“we’ve morphed from being a village that helps raise children to a parenting police state,” -Petula Dvorak https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-kids-and-our-parenting-police-state/2015/04/13/42c30336-e1df-11e4-905f-cc896d379a32_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-kids-and-our...
thriftwy 9y ago
I've read in some paper about Ice Cream Test: Whether your 7 years old can get to the corner store and back after buying an ice cream there without encountering any dangers such as traffic. Immediately thought that you could be jailed for that in some jurisdictions. Having said that, I think the number of people who let their kids free-range is decreasing everywhere unfortunately.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  In Japan, there is a tv show that secretly follows 4 or 5 year old kids on their first trip to the store alone. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9eMZp8KsZ5k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9eMZp8KsZ5k So free ranging is not decreasing in all countries, just a few.
- ovulator 9y ago
  Corner store? You mean the Mega-lo-mart only accessibly after hopping on the free way?
  - btilly 9y ago
    Where I live my kids can go on a 5 minute walk through a quiet neighborhood then cross one street to get to McDonalds. If they go a different direction they wind up at Subway. In 10 minutes they can go to a wide variety of places, everything from IHOP to a dollar store. Albertsons is an 11 minute walk. Less if they run. More if they stop and play at the park on the way. Not all of suburbia is big box malls off of freeways. There are a lot of little strip malls around as well. And you can choose a place for how walkable it is.
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      That's anecdotal. 10 minutes of walking won't even get you out of my subdivision. Plop down a 15-minute radius on my map and there are literally zero places of business anywhere in it. This is largely due to zoning. There is a strip of land zoned for local businesses a mere 10 minutes away, but unsurprisingly, no one has chosen to build anything on it. You can't always prioritize walkability if you have a limit on your housing budget. My current place costs $11k/year, and the commuting to work by car isn't entirely horrible. But walking anywhere is really out of the question.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    I live in a suburban neighborhood. We're near a number of stores and restaurants without crossing any streets, and the number multiplies if you allow a crossing or two. An actual grocery store is about half an hour's walk, but it's closer than the freeway, and you'd pass three or four convenience stores and about a dozen restaurants within the same distance. Getting to Mega-lo-mart would be a 45 minute walk, and involves going under the toll road overpass and crossing about 4 streets (so, a little farther than I'll want my kid going anytime soon).
- tomc1985 9y ago
  There was always some stigma against free-range parenting (think the grocery store scene in Home Alone) but it's gotten much, much worse
  - astura 9y ago
    What we would now call "free range parenting" was normal until recently.
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  I think the word we're missing is pedophiles, we don't let kids roam far due to the increase fear of pedophiles - although I suspect the risk level havent changed as much as the publicity. Im probably better with traffic back then than I am now. Back in my day say when we were 9 or 10 so, we're be away from home for several hours at time during school holidays, sometimes we'd venture a little further than we'd admit to our parents - and bunk on a train to nearby city to cause a bit mayhem there etc.., we're try a get back before tea time incase the parents started calling each other and stories weren't solid. At age of 7 we certainly accustomed to the local shops and parks. I speak to parents now and the phrase often is 'the world is a different place' they mean there a new awareness of nonces. That's the unfortunate truth, of course there were still extremely cagey parents back then too, I felt sorry for those kids.
Pulcinella 9y ago
You won’t have CPS called on you for letting your children wander and play in the neighbor. Please don’t spread nonsense. Edited with my response to everyone depositing articles about the Meitivs: Nobody “called CPS on” the Meitivs. Somebody called the polic because they saw the children wandering around a parking garage (not a park like in many of the news stories. See [1].) The police officer then called CPS several times wondering what to do with children before finally driving over to CPS when they were dragging their heels[2]. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-family-again.. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/free-range-family-again.... [2] Not that I think CPS is great. As a teacher, it’s basically impossible to get CPS to do anything unless the parents are abusing the children right in front of you on school property. Part of that is CPS being overworked and underfunded/understaffed. Part of that is that is it still usually better to keep the kids with their parents instead of foster care. And part of it is CPS not having the resources to have more options besides arrest parents or do nothing (like offering social services to the parents). Also I would argue there is a difference between letting your children play in the neighborhood outside your house and just leaving your children at the park for hours. I have had students who haven been abandoned at the park with their younger siblings.
- vamin 9y ago
  I know you're already getting a torrent of anecdotes right now, but I really think it's important not to sweep this under the rug. I have a co-worker who lives in a nice suburban neighborhood and had CPS called on him because his child was allowed to play in the park across the street from his house unsupervised. His child was interviewed by a social worker, his house was searched for drugs, the contents of his fridge were evaluated, and he had to go to court. In my state, it only takes one person to call, and once that person calls, an investigation is legally required, regardless of how spurious.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Depends on your neighbors and your neighborhood. Definitely not a universal, but it can fit an existential.
- mankyd 9y ago
  "The Maryland parents accused of child neglect for letting their children roam freely had to retrieve their children from Child Protective Services after they were removed from a park Sunday by police." http://www.wusa9.com/news/local/silver-spring/md-free-range-children-taken-by-cps/203337260 http://www.wusa9.com/news/local/silver-spring/md-free-range-...
aidos 9y ago
Or maybe because fathers are much more involved than 50 years ago? There are probably a load of reasons and I don't think it's just helicopter parenting. My father in law never changed a nappy for any of his 3 children, and that was normal. It certainly isn't now.
- dinoleif 9y ago
  Fathers can't be involved if they aren't around. Single motherhood rate in 1950: 5% Single motherhood rate in 2010: 41%
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    Fathers can be around without being married to the mother.
    - dinoleif 9y ago
      From a technical perspective sure. From a statistical perspective, the point is a distraction.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        It's not, because unmarried long-term cohabitation has exploded.
        pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        How long term? As long as a whole childhood?
        astura 9y ago
        Unsurprisingly most unmarried parents break up before their kid is an adult. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-gaspard-msw-licsw/living-together-without-marriage_b_6520118.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-gaspard-msw-licsw/livin... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2004878/Unmarried-parents-6-times-likely-split-time-child-5.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2004878/Unmarried-pa...
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
Man that meme really went wild huh Yes, CPS in one state did something ambiguous and alarming to self-proclaimed "free range" parents. No, you probably don't have the full story that a guy who had never seen the children before was concerned about their safety in that part of town, he decided to call 911 instead of talking to the kids and coming off as a creep. Yes, that one town's police department did get the CPS' attention, and the CPS did an investigation and found something arbitrary which is rightfully concerning. No, this isn't indicative of the entire US culture or widespread neighborly paranoia about children walking unattended.
- Larrikin 9y ago
  It sick in its own right that society has demonized talking to any children that aren't your own or in your care. Police should not have been called in that situation and just asking if the kids are ok or lost should not be viewed as a creepy action.
  - taeric 9y ago
    I'm torn. I fully agree with you. I also think quickly calling the cops to check on them as you go do something else shouldn't be that big of a deal. Because, to my mind, police should be part of the community. Ideally, not strangers in uniform. No, I don't think that is the case most (any?) place. :( I'm also afraid to look at the statistics, as I fear I'll see that this is another slant in class/race standings. :(
    - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      Indeed, if you do call the cops they should be able to send someone to speak to the children to check they're OK, make sure they've not absconded or something, rather than making an incident out of it.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  It's extremely unusual to see unescorted children where I live, below early teens or so. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to hear about someone calling the police after seeing a child outside on their own; that's just the current culture. I live in a small gated community, in among other ungated neighborhoods. I see kids playing around my neighborhood, but never leaving it on their own. I hear grumbling from some of my neighbors even about that.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
junkscience2017 9y ago
I can't get my kids out of the house. I try. All of their friends are on SnapChat and/or Steam games. No one leaves their rooms. It is really depressing. Kids are not getting fresh air anymore.
- tn_ 9y ago
  How old were your kids before they got their smartphones/computers?
  - junkscience2017 9y ago
    in our area, most kids seem to be carrying iPhones by 4th grade. sad, but there it is.
    - ashark 9y ago
      My wife's a teacher. ~1/2 of the kids around here have smartphones by 2nd or 3rd grade, all but the children of "weirdos" (maybe 2-3%) have them by 5th. The schools don't make them leave them at home anymore like they did back when regular ol' dumb phones started to show up in kids' possession. Sometimes kids will be texting during class and it's their friggin' parents they're texting, as in, their parents contacted them during class. This is not as rare an occurrence as one might hope. Teachers can't confiscate them for practically any reason because most parents freak out if they do. No parental support for discipline basically = teachers can't do it (it's ineffective and a bigger headache than it's worth). This at lower- to middle-middle class schools, not the rich ones. And we're deep in flyover country, not anywhere trendy.
- DoubleCribble 9y ago
  Mystery power outages that seem to hit only our house have been known to occur in my neighborhood on fine weather days. It's like a ghost in the breaker box or something...
  - conanbatt 9y ago
acemv 9y ago
Unlikely -- As a parent, I am regularly exposed to messaging from local, state and the federal government, public school system, healthcare professionals, and parental advice "experts" on the importance of family bounding and spending time with my children. I go out of my way to be more attentive to my children in the evening after work, and during the weekends. Their day to day lives are significantly more structured than my own upbringing. Perhaps the rise in family time is due to this decades long mass messaging campaign around the developed world. And I don't think this is bad! Why? This social response is natural response to the rise in use of social media, entertainment and other electronic distractions.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  The concerning thing, though, is the way we start demonizing and going after parents who are unable to do this because of, say, their jobs not making it feasible.
QAPereo 9y ago
Can you cite some cases of that happening, preferably a pattern of said cases?
gajomi 9y ago
This seems improbable. Of course it depends a bit on the number of hours required to effectively helicopter parent, but the data for USA mothers indicates something like a 100% increase in time spent since 1965 resulting in two total hours a day, which seems far to little for any kind of omnipresence (similar results for fathers). Of course, these numbers are "on average" so you might argue that there are helicopter parenting subpopulations contributing to this increase, but this data can't provide evidence for or against that. The data in Denmark (where there really has been an orders of magnitude increase) and in France (with the decrease) seems like interesting places to look into. It could be that systematic reporting biases have a significant role to play in these results.
- watwut 9y ago
  How do you count when stay at home mom (norm in middle class 50ties) does housework or reads/solves crossword while the kid is playing around and she is answering those "look what I done" requests? It is both speding time with kid and not spending time with kid.
  - gajomi 9y ago
    This is a very good question and would seemingly be implicated in a critical view of the reporting methodology. I have been impressed with the work the NYT data team shows on their github (or whatever). It looks like the economist has an account: https://github.com/economist-data-team https://github.com/economist-data-team but in a few minutes searching around couldn't find any links to data sources. There was a footer mentioning that you could read more on the marriage special report, but I encountered a paywall :)
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  You don't need to spend time with someone to micromanage them.
  - goialoq 9y ago
    Then micromanaging is not related to the OP research about spending time with them.
rdtsc 9y ago
Happened to co-worker. They don't even know which neighbor did it, but it resulted in embarrassment, including calls at work from police, home visits etc.
- goialoq 9y ago
  What age was the child?
  - rdtsc 9y ago
    Maybe 2nd or 3rd grade. Playing in the front yard with parents watching from the house.
deleted 9y ago
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nasalgoat 9y ago
I think it is less in vogue than you imagine. Every single parent I interact with via my son's activities expresses a lot of distain for it and generally promotes free time for their kids. I think the tide is turning back to free-range parenting.

ashark 9y ago

1) What's the age range for children, here? All, 0-18? Something else? 2) Is this per kid or per parent? That is, do you get more "points" if you have three kids and spend an hour with all three than if you spend an hour with just one of them, or does it count the same? Per kid the latter'd be lower averaged over the three, per parent it's the same. Looks like it's per-parent but I'm not entirely sure. [EDIT] notably, if it's per-parent, this doesn't necessarily mean kids are getting as much more total time with their parents as it might seem. Mom spending an hour, then dad spending an hour separately, is 2 hours of kid-with-at-least-one-parent time, but both parents at the same time for one hour is two parent-hours of time but only one hour of time-with-at-least-one-parent for the kid. [EDIT EDIT] of course the other metric would be vulnerable to that too, I was sloppy. Point is I'd be curious how much time-with-any-parent for each kid went up over the same period.

pchristensen 9y ago
Per #2, families are much smaller on average now so even if they count that way, I don't think that would contribute much.
- bertil 9y ago
  Related to families changing structure: what about step-parents?
  - ashark 9y ago
    Oh, relatedly, I wonder whether time in the care of non-parent adult relatives or friends-of-parents (i.e. not paid childcare or teachers) dropped substantially over the same time period.
andreliem 9y ago
Interested in the age range as well. Huge difference between infants, prek, k-middle school and beyond.
ddeck 9y ago
I believe this is the source for the article: Educational Gradients in Parents' Child-Care Time Across Countries, 1965–2012[1] It's behind a paywall, but the PR from the UCI study states: Study findings were based on the Multinational Time Use Study Harmonized Simple Files, which focused on parents between the ages of 18 and 65 living in households with at least one child under the age of 13 [2] [1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12305/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12305/full [2] https://news.uci.edu/2016/09/28/todays-parents-spend-more-time-with-their-kids-than-moms-and-dads-did-50-years-ago/ https://news.uci.edu/2016/09/28/todays-parents-spend-more-ti...

kelukelugames 9y ago

>One analysis of 11 rich countries estimates that the average mother spent 54 minutes a day caring for children in 1965 but 104 minutes in 2012. Men do less than women, but far more than men in the past: their child-caring time has jumped from 16 minutes a day to 59. I spend 100+ minutes every day changing diapers. Actually that's not true, most of my time is spent trying to put the stupid newborn to go to sleep. I thought paternity leave was going to be chill and maybe I can learn a new hobby, master javascript, or travel to Europe. Nope, more stress than day job. I think fatherhood is evolving too. My father's generation almost did nothing and that was acceptable. That is changing. One of the women in a dual income family says "Mom handles input, Dad handles output."

deleted 9y ago
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aidos 9y ago
Who am I to judge, but it's paternity leave for a reason - and not so your "stupid newborn" can get in the way of learning a new hobby. EDIT it was a lot less like a joke originally. Apologies for the offense caused by missing that.
- kelukelugames 9y ago
  I'm making a joke. :) Thanks for the feedback. I made the list more outrageous so it's more obvious. A lot of male comedians transition to family jokes after having children. This could be the catalyst for my stand up career!
  - strictnein 9y ago
    From personal experience, you will soon transition to making dad jokes. I do it daily. I'm hilarious (to no one but myself).
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    > A lot of male comedians transition to family jokes after having children. "dadmedians" Your kids will love hearing that about their dad, until they are older anyway and start to roll their eyes :)

baldfat 9y ago

The problem is that 90% of the time the parents are now on their phones. Seriously I find myself on my phone and not interacting with my kids at times and I am super sensitive about phones. I don't allow phones during meals, during family time and not when someone is talking with you. I break my own rules a ton :(

cknoxrun 9y ago
I've mentioned this before on here, but for me tossing the smart phone and getting a flip phone has utterly changed the dynamic with my children. It has been 3 months, and I am still amazed (although I guess I shouldn't be) that being actually present with them when we interact has seemed to reduce their neediness/anxiety and improved our relationship/bond. If you can, I recommend giving it a try.
- el_benhameen 9y ago
  I want to do this, but my one hangup is the lack of a decent camera. I know that I probably don’t need to document my kid’s life as much as I do, but I do like being able to share moments with my own parents, who live a ways away. How did you handle this aspect of the change? Do you carry a dslr or point and shoot, or do you just go without (or have flip phone cameras improved a ton since my last one)?
  - Chickenality 9y ago
    Maybe just commit to removing the most attention-grabbing apps from your phone? Seems like a good way to keep the aspects of your phone that you value while getting rid of the ones that you don't.
    - alkonaut 9y ago
      Yeah a time schedule or a really long and cumbersome unlock password for social media and web browser would really help. But then you need that recipe for dinner and you think "this is stupid, I'm an adult, I can handle this" and you remove it.

justinzollars 9y ago

Wow! That's an amazing stat!

cmrdporcupine 9y ago

In my experience kids are spending less time with friends, and more time at home. So more time with parents. But is that a good thing? Is it quality time?

Troyboy 9y ago

How is this even possible when nearly all households requiring dual incomes?

IncRnd 9y ago
It's possible, because people don't work 24 hours a day and might choose to give up things like television or tablet use in order to spend time with their kids.
TheGRS 9y ago
That was my first thought, but there is also a huge increase in the amount of activities kids do these days, with also an increase in parental participation. Marginal gains over the years have added up. i.e. campaigns to spend time with your kids, PTA meetings, involvement with clubs and sports. I'm sure not all of it is positive (like extreme helicopter parenting), but for the most part it seems to be a good thing.
nasalgoat 9y ago
Weekends. Dad used to fiddle in the basement or go golfing, now he goes to soccer practice or the park.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Did dad used to fix stuff in the basement, rather than "fiddle", everything now is made to break and be harder to repair than to replace ...
Cd00d 9y ago
I think it was an interview with Bob Newhart (maybe WTF), where he talked about how his dad was never home - instead he went to the bar and hung out with his buddies every night. The interviewer asked him why, and Newhart answered "I guess he didn't really like us very much" (sad, but with a funny delivery). But, maybe we have more "family" time between dinner and bed than previous generations? I don't know. It seems to me, anecdotally, that people tend to spend more time at home in front of tv in the evenings, as opposed to hanging out at bars, for example, than may have been the standard of the past. The pubs in my neighborhood don't have the daily regulars like on Cheers....

picodguyo 9y ago

It's interesting that reactions to stories about parenting are always default-negative no matter what. People are saying this stat just shows we are smothering our children. Had it been the opposite (half as much time), people would be accusing parents of outsourcing childcare.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
Negative responses trigger a greater emotional response, thus garner more attention and upvotes. The fact that negative content commonly reaches the top is just a side effect of the voting system, which reflects human psychology. As an aside, I think the rise of subreddits like r/wholesomememes and other purely positive subreddits on r/all was done intentionally to counter the rampant negativity on Reddit. I think it's great. I wonder what kind of cultural guidance systems the mods on this site have in place.
azernik 9y ago
But probably different people. Communities are very capable of holding conflicting viewpoints.
- watwut 9y ago
  The point is, only angry and negative people voice their opinions and positively minded people don't. If you look at threads about something else, (say economy or politics) there are typically both optimostic and pessimistic people and even some discussions between those groups. When it comes to parenting and children, positive opinions are rarely heard.
  - rjzzleep 9y ago
    Honestly, if you want to make a point, you should work on the way you phrase it. > only angry and negative voice their opinions i.e. bad people > positively minded i.e. good people I know you probably didn't think about it that much. Personally, I could start a rant about toxic culture now, but I'll leave it at that. If you don't want to create an aggressive response, maybe refrain from calling people that disagree with you angry and negative. EDIT: here's a suggestion for a good way to phrase the actual meaning you might have been thinking about: People that are happy about the way something is, are less likely to complain about it. Yes, true, but that by itself doesn't make the thing either good or bad.

cylinder 9y ago

Less household chores to do these days, more time sitting next to kid refreshing Twitter

riazrizvi 9y ago

> [for men] child-caring time has jumped from 16 minutes a day to 59. I always wanted to spend more time with my own children than my father did with me. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who managed to pull it off.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Perhaps ... I've spent 12 hours today with my kids, all but the first hour-90 minutes of their day (excepting school time for the schoolies; about 5 hours in the same space as them). I didn't read the article but is this effect coming from father's doing more time as stay-at-home parents? [FWIW we're dead poor financially at least in part through choice to have lots of contact with our kids.]
- balabaster 9y ago
  After spending 12 hours with my kids, they would spend about 6 of those fighting with each other and me pulling my hair out and wanting to bash their heads together because they can't see their way past their rage for the other's existence. No matter what I try, they just cannot accept that each other have free will to do as they please and that isn't always going to coincide with what they want and they need to learn to be okay with that. 12 hours straight with them is like putting all of us in a torture chamber. They're angels when they're apart, but put them in the same room together for more than 20 minutes and it's like the Blair Witch Project. By the end of the weekend, I find myself longing for Monday for them to go back to school and be separated from one another :D
  - riazrizvi 9y ago
    I grew up with a lot of teasing and fighting. I used that experience to train my own kids to get along. My approach boils down to a zero tolerance policy prohibiting early abusive interactions. The type of ‘joking and playing’ that is really abuse-with-a-smile that inevitably ends in tears. I’m simplifying though. Over the years family friends have repeatedly commented on how well they get along (they are 11 & 13 now) but I just see the byproduct of strict training. And it hasn’t stopped, because as they age and make new friends, they develop new mean spirited habits.

nicholasjarnold 9y ago

I don't have any peer reviewed studies to point to here, but I do remember reading about both the stagnation of middle-class incomes and the rising cost of childcare in recent years. If you take those ideas as fact and couple them with the people commenting on the 'parenting police state' it makes sense that we're seeing an increase in time spent with children. Will this increased parenting time lead to humans that are better or worse prepared to cope with and thrive in the world after leaving the nest?

bunderbunder 9y ago
I'm not prepared to dig up any articles right now, but a lot of child psychologists seem to be worried that it will make children worse off in the long run. All that constant parental contact inhibits their learning how to be independent.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  Out of all the people I know, those who seem to worry about everything they encounter were all trained in psychology or sociology.

pwinnski 9y ago

IncRnd 9y ago
> So that's 70 minutes combined up to 163 combined, or a 133% increase, more than double. That's only true if parents are never together when they spend time with their children.

bkovacev 9y ago

I wish I had more solid evidence to call bs on this, but from my real world experience this is far from the truth.

verifex 9y ago

I was going to initially say something about child-care, but then I read the article and saw that men child-care time was previously 16 minutes a day in 1965, and now is up to around 59 minutes. That actually seems like a positive trend; at least from a holistic and common-sense point of view. It seems pretty strange that the men would spend such little time with their offspring. Now, we need a study to see what affect men spending more time with their offspring is having on them and society in general.

jaclaz 9y ago
I guess it depends greatly from the "business or trade" of the parents, beyond the periods. Personally (and in the '60's) I had the great fortune of having both mom and pop working "on their own", (and not in a factory, in a public office or similar) so basically after school I went to either my father's studio or to my mother's laboratory, until I was 12 or so I made there my homeworks, or played there. Even if it wasn't time "dedicated" to me, as they were anyway at work doing their jobs, one or the other parent was always present, at the most in the next room. I could see the difference when compared to my friends/classmates (of course not their or their parents' fault) which had parents that went out in the morning and came back home only in the evening, due to their job. A lot less communication between them and parents, and a lot less "experience" on what happens everyday in "adult's" life.

peeters 9y ago

OK I'll ask: what's the deal with Denmark?

jessriedel 9y ago
It really makes the data hard to believe. ~5 minutes per day of child care in 1965? Really can't conclude anything from this until we understand that number.
luk32 9y ago
Lol. I thought I'm the only one. We're they dispossessed of their children before or what? This kinda makes methodology dubious.
ovulator 9y ago
The study only had two data points for Denmark, and extrapolated the rest from that.
- nkurz 9y ago
  I'm not sure if you are being serious or joking, but yes, this does turn out to be exactly the problem. The study only has data points for Denmark in 1987 and 2001, and the whole rest of the curve is extrapolated from the data from these two years. France, the other extreme outlier and the focus of the Economist article, is extrapolated from 3 years. The original graph at least tries to show error bars, but the Economist's "cartoon" helpfully omitted them. Theoretically, there might be something useful hidden somewhere else in the paper, but the graph that the Economist focuses on is rubbish.

robertwiblin 9y ago

"One of Galinsky's more surprising findings centered around a question she posed to both children and parents: "If you were granted one wish to change the way your mother's/your father's work affects your life, what would that wish be?" Some 56 percent of parents anticipated that their children would want more time with their parents and for their parents to spend less time at work, yet only 10 percent of the children actually wanted more time with their mothers and only 16 percent wanted more time with their fathers. A far larger proportion, 34 percent, wished that their mothers would be less stressed and less tired, and 28 percent wished this about their fathers." http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/05/listen_to_the_c.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/05/listen_to_the_c....

sbinthree 9y ago
This makes sense. I would much rather have less and more positive interactions with my parents than more or more stressful ones. Some people seem to have a "my parent was never around" complex but that usually seems to involve some combination of 1. Parent completely absent, not home at night, not reliable or away for extended periods working or 2. Parent missing key, meaningful events like the "dance recital" trope or 3. Parent outsources parenting to nanny and doesn't really monitor outcomes. If you are there for the important things, when you say you will be, and home for dinner (present, not just emailing on your phone) as often as you can be, that seems to matter more than working part time or other modern and progressive interpretations of being an engaged parent and with your kids.
- rayiner 9y ago
  This. My dad worked 70 hours a week and travelled for work 30% of the time growing up, but we never felt “he was never around” because he made it to graduation events and little league and called us every day after school.
  - arbie 9y ago
    Things like frequent phone calls seen inconsequential, but: 1) They take significant dedication and scheduling on the part of the parent(s) and, 2) Have an outsize impact on the perception of your dependability. Huge from a kid's perspective.

callmeed 9y ago

Here's a few random guesses at causation: 1. Kindergarten redshirting 2. Most Kindergartens in the US now are half-day (EDIT: this is false) 3. Helicopter parenting 4. Family & Medical Leave Act ('93) + Longer maternity/paternity leave allowances by employees 5. An increase in single-parent households on some sort of welfare/assistance program (i.e. the single parent is at home and cannot work) 6. Increase in the number of parents allowed to work remotely from home Really wish they'd give more details on how these statistics were gathered, what age range we're talking about, etc.

learc83 9y ago
>Most Kindergartens in the US now are half-day The trend is towards full day Kindergarten not the other direction. More than half of Kindergarten programs are full day now, which is much higher than 50 years ago.
- callmeed 9y ago
  My bad. At least where I live (California central coast), all public school Kindergartens are half-day. The only full-day options are private school.
  - rconti 9y ago
    When I was a kid, in the 80s, our public schools were half-day kindergarten as well (Washington).
    - amyjess 9y ago
      Same for me, in North Texas. Born in the '80s, went to kindergarten in 1990-91.
jaymzcampbell 9y ago
Bit OT, but I was unfamiliar with the term "redshirting" (apart from Star Trek connotations, which I assumed isn't what was meant :) For the non-US people: the practice of postponing entrance into kindergarten of age-eligible children in order to allow extra time for socioemotional, intellectual, or physical growth [1] I remember hearing something about this sort of thing over here in the UK. I was surprised to see this wasn't accepted policy [2] until as late as 2015. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirting_(academic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirting_(academic) [2] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/summer-born-children-to-get-the-right-to-start-school-later https://www.gov.uk/government/news/summer-born-children-to-g...

Romanulus 9y ago

Quantity != Quality.

teilo 9y ago

The amount of time parents spend with their children is certainly a factor in the well-rounded upbringing of a child, but it is a poor metric by itself. Children need parental involvement, parental accountability and discipline, and good parental examples to follow. If the latter two are lacking, the first is largely irrelevant.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Agreed with the proviso that it's not just "with" but "caring for". You can be with them and not engaging in any way. You can be caring for them without being directly engaged with them (eg supervising a playpark visit).

tzakrajs 9y ago

They don't specify the age of the children, but one reason might be that more young adults are finding it difficult to be employed thus spending more time with their family.

tempestn 9y ago

I found it very interesting how the change in time spent is so inversely proportional to the starting time spent in all cases. Every country that started low overshot every one that started high, and the lowest ended up highest, while the highest was the only one to decline. Some of that is explained by the bounds on time in the day, but certainly not all. Perhaps some societal backlash (or 'pendulum effect') to the extreme. Also interesting is that those trend lines appear to strongly suggest it will go considerably farther still.

juanmirocks 9y ago

Does this study also consider that children remain living at their parents' for longer and longer? For example, it is not bizarrely uncommon in Spain to find people in their late twenties or thirties still living with their parents.

otakucode 9y ago

This is a bad thing. Children are being straight up stifled and their ability to develop independence being actively and aggressively destroyed. We will pay a very steep price for this.

komali2 9y ago
I've been tossing this idea around actually. Gotta find some way to put my anthropology minor to use :P All unsourced speculative thoughts: So, traditionally, across all early human civilizations (including pre-ag revolution), my understanding is that kids weren't "raised" by their parents - everyone just kind of hung out in their villages, doing misc tasks/work, while the children ran free. The "raising" was done by the village as a whole, with the village elders taking an authoritative stance. Unlike in today's society, there isn't this massive, silo'd burden of ensuring a kid grows up sane / well adjusted / useful to society lumped onto two people who have literally never done it before and have to juggle the responsibility with as much as 8 hours a day or more of work to provide food/shelter for the kids. On average, these couples get about 1.5 "kids" worth of "raising kids" experience, and then that knowledge just dies off because they don't raise any more kids and don't really participate in the raising of their grandchildren. Compare that to a village where everybody is involved in raising kids, in particular the elders who might have seen tens of children growing and developing, from birth right up to adulthood. I guess my point is I'm not sure we're really doing "raising kids" in the best way anymore - I don't understand how it's acceptable that 1. Parents need to spend the majority of time away from children to provide food and shelter for the children 2. Two people with minimal "parenting" skills are entrusted with the raising of children from birth to adulthood EDIT: These thoughts apply to American white culture. Asian cultures still involve grandparents heavily in raising the child (grandparents raising the kids while parents are at work - I got my own issues with that as well but this isn't the place for it) and pockets of Black American neighborhoods where kids are raised by the community / large family units. (There's actually really great books written on how Black American kids grow up super socially adjusted, verbose, and confident because of how much time they spend hanging out with various adults)
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago

kevmo 9y ago

How much time compared to 300 years ago?

megaman22 9y ago

I spent a lot of time with my parents. Lots and lots of time splitting wood, tinkering on equipment, toiling in the garden, working in the yard. At the time, I would have loved to spend less time with them.

metaobject 9y ago
Looking back, what about now? Overall, are you happy with the amount of time you did spend with your parents?

j_s 9y ago

Is there any evaluation of quality vs quantity? Technology adds more and more distractions, reducing effects of physical presence.

alkonaut 9y ago

"With" as in "nearby" or "with" as in "interacting with"?

linkregister 9y ago

This article is half-baked. How were parents spending less time with their children? Day-care facilities have greater attendance than ever. Were relatives watching the children? What age ranges were covered? Without more information, the graphs are meaningless. Maybe it's due to children having more unsupervised, outdoor play. Maybe it's due to relatives watching children more. If the age range is 0-5 years, the results are astonishing. If the age range is 0-18 years, then perhaps it's just a remnant of the shift from rural to urban populations, and the decrease of outside-the-home time by teenagers.

astura 9y ago
This is not surprising. When I was growing up kids mainly entertained themselves or each other the vast majority of the time. When I was a kid 99.9% of the time I did my own thing and didn't interact very much with adults. Now people want to entertain their kids all the time.

agumonkey 9y ago

I read patents

jknz 9y ago

iOS 13 and Android 11 future killer feature: When the user leaves work, turn off all email notifications as well as any notification from a non-family contact (including the addictive red "1" in the corner of app icons on the home screen). Turn it back on whenever the user is back at work or at 9 on the next weekday.

dailyvijeos 9y ago

It’s no surprise because helicopter parents also don’t have their priorities or common-sense in order.

gautamdivgi 9y ago

I’m definitely not an expert here but isn’t less time with parents a characteristic of the Industrial Age? Before that when movement across jobs was fairly static I believe the family craft would be passed down with the parents as teachers. I could be totally off the mark here but would definitely like to know more

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

SubiculumCode 9y ago

I don't have a subscription. Does the author consider the broader historical context? For example, on near subsistence agricultural societies, I imagine that families spend a lot of time working together, for example. Same with hunter-gathering, or even son-as apprentice trade crafts.

roel_v 9y ago
Somehow I don't think that tilling land with a baby strapped to your back would be counted as 'spending time with'...
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  I imagine herding the sheep or hunting deer with my son would qualify, or any of the other common tasks of agrarian and hunter gather societies.

creo 9y ago

Quantity over quality? There is "don't reinvent the wheel" stereotype in software industry, but it does not apply to other areas by the looks of it.

k__ 9y ago

I know many parents were at least the father started working more and often far away from their family. Sure they need more money with children, but how good is the money if you only see them on the weekend? Sometimes it sounds like an excuse so they don't have to hang around with them, but maybe I'm just bitter, because my father left me when I was 6 and even the years before I barely saw him :/

saiya-jin 9y ago
I am sorry for your experience, I hope you did/will overcome it and forgive him for this. There is huge power and freedom for you once you do, albeit it must be hard. I think children don't require huge amount of time, rather quality (100% focus) and often (ie 1 hour daily is much better than 7 hours at once 1x a week - effectively it should be much more though)
balabaster 9y ago
It's so weird how different our perspectives are given that my father too left when I was 6. Despite feeling some... I dunno, I guess a wish that I'd had a relationship with him. But I don't feel any bitterness or anger towards him. He did what was right for him and I can't fault him for that. Sure, it meant I didn't have a Dad and we now don't have a relationship because there was never time for that to grow, so that's a little sad, but I don't harbor any resentment for that. I'll have a pint with him if I see him, he's a nice guy, I like what I know of him, I see a lot of myself in him, but he may as well just be some other guy. We've probably not spent more than 6 months of time together in total since I was 6. I'll be 42 this year. It would be easy to harbour resentment for that, but what's the point? It doesn't serve any purpose, it won't change anything. It won't bring us closer together. It'll just make two people feel bad without any positive value.
- k__ 9y ago
  Oh I don't resent him, he's just not a person I would like to spend time with. I just often think I'm generally bitter about parenting because of this.

nhumrich 9y ago

If this article is accurate (data source looks shady and lacking statistical significance) I believe it. I think for me, the main thing that would explain the increase is that you now have to watch your kid. What I mean is, when my parents were growing up, they would just wander the streets, hang out with other kids, and generally raise themselves. But now in days (at least in US) parent supervision is required for just about everything, and parents are afraid to let kids just go and wander (for good reasons).

balabaster 9y ago
No more good reasons than historically. The media is to blame for much of the hysteria around what we should be doing as parents. I would've gone out of my mind as a kid if I was raised the way parents are expected to inject themselves into every facet of their kids lives. I need my space, even when I'm in a relationship I don't want anyone injecting themselves in my space. Not my parents, not my partner, not my kids, nobody. If you never make your kids deal with being unsupervised and alone for periods, they will never be able to be alone, which will make them dependent on spouses and partners constantly for their emotional well-being. That is unhealthy for themselves and their partners. Obviously we can't know the consequences of society's overbearing and overzealous parenting "rules" until our kids become adults, but mark my words, they will come back to bite our kids in the asses if we don't give our kids room to breathe.

LeicaLatte 9y ago

Even if true, it was probably unintentional.

balabaster 9y ago

I think back to when I was a kid... My parents divorced when I was 6. Didn't really have a Dad to speak of until my Mum remarried when I was 14. That's a huge span of time for a kid to go through with one parent struggling to make ends meet. She worked hard and I'm sure she was stressed struggling to support 2 boys of 6 and 3. Work for her finished 3 hours after we finished school and there often wasn't an after school program to cover us so we would go to her office and help with photocopying and filing. I never recall feeling like she wasn't there. Even when she didn't have time to pay us attention, she was there. It never occurred to me as a kid that she didn't pay me attention. I was too busy paying attention to my own interests. She was home for dinner every night. She was the worst cook in the world back then, I laugh about it now, but you know what? She tried, fuck she tried. We turned out okay. She didn't poison us and now she's an amazing cook. I'd eat her home cooked meals over a restaurant meal any day of the week. She introduced me to reading at a young age. I'd read for hours, days and weeks with our only interaction being to call out spellings of words from my bedroom to the living room to ask what the word was, I have no idea what she was doing, only that she responded to my query. I'm thankful we had a small school and aside from a few troubled kids, most of us could say we were at least friendly if not friends. I could name every kid in that school and I knew all of their parents. We all knew at least half a dozen other parents we could go to if we needed something and long before school was out, most of us had adopted some other kids parents as our own and we floated between each others houses as if they were our own too. Did I spend a lot of my childhood longing for what I didn't have? A relationship with my father like "normal" kids. Sure I did. I still do as an adult. But it is what it is. I make damn sure that my kids never have to wonder if I care, or wonder where my priority is. I frequently work 12-15 hours a day, including weekends. But be sure, if my kids tell me they need me somewhere for something, I drop everything and I'm there. School events, plays, recitals, karate presentations, dinner and reading to them for half an hour at bedtime. It's important that kids have space to grow on their own. They need that. They may think they want you in their space all the time, but that breeds dependence on your approval and input into their thought processes. If you want to raise independent adults that have confidence in their own decision making skills, you need to get out of the way and give them room to make shit decisions and pick up the pieces while it's not going to kill them. Wisdom comes from experience, experience comes from making bad decisions and picking yourself up and trying again. If you bubble wrap them and protect them from every trauma you're scared of, they will never learn for themselves. I think if I analyze my childhood, my Mum probably spent only a fraction with us boys that would be seen as acceptable today, certainly much less than I give my kids, but in my eyes she did it right. She gave us the room to become strong independent men, able to stand alone and take on the world. She gave us just enough pride to make us feel like we'd earned it, but not enough to let it go to our heads. Able to make decisions for ourselves and deal with the consequences of those decisions and clean up our own messes. If I could rewind to my childhood and ask her to do anything differently, I wouldn't ask her to change a thing. She did good. The greatest thing I learned from her was that you don't need to panic about raising your kids. All you need to do is observe and listen. Your kids will tell you what they need. Give just enough, just enough to make them earn it. This way when they become adults, they will know how to make it on their own.

chrisbrandow 9y ago

As a parent of three kids 10-16, I can absolutely testify to the shift in the way my cohort parents compared to our parents. All the parents I talk to are keenly aware of the “over-parenting” dynamic, but it is very tough to break out of for “reasons”. There are a ton of subtle forces and dynamics that funnel everyone into these patterns. I still find it confounding however. I bet an enormous part of it is how unusual it is for kids <13 years old to walk places on their own. It really would stand out if your 11 year old kid walked a mile to school/store. Even though that was entirely common when I was a kid.