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I realized after I had kids that a huge amount of "new urbanist" thought is driven by the young and childless and does not incorporate the needs of people with

• zxcmx 7y ago
  Our ancestors got their children working as soon as they were able. Farm work, piece work, factory work, whatever. Kind of frowned upon now.
  • api 7y ago
    It's not possible now. I'd say a good 80% of the work I do requires at least a year of intensive study and/or hands-on learning to even be capable of attempting and another 5-10 years to master. Nowadays someone needs a minimum of four years of college to be able to do anything. You can't start contributing to society until you're 20. Everything easy has been automated or outsourced.
    • randomdata 7y ago
      > I'd say a good 80% of the work I do requires at least a year of intensive study and/or hands-on learning to even be capable of attempting One year is nothing, really. As a farmer, the work I do required about a decade of study before I could be productive on my own, and I'm still working on mastering it. In the days of yore, farm kids had to start engaging with their teachers as soon as they could as it was the only way they were going to be able to be capable of attempting the practice once they reached adulthood. > Nowadays someone needs a minimum of four years of college to be able to do anything. Well, you need four years of college to get past the gatekeeping. Gatekeeping that is setup because the work has become so much more accessible, necessitating means to cull competition. You don't have to start as a young child nowadays like the farm kids used to have to. You can easily coast into adulthood without even thinking about a career.
    • Kaiyou 7y ago
      Make it 5 years. If you start having the kid do it at six years old, he can be productive at eleven years old, can't he? Make it a slow kid and he'd still be productive at fourteen years old. School and college is pretty much just to waste your time. None of the things you learn transfer well into work life.
    • mac01021 7y ago
      I unloaded trucks, scraped foodscraps into the trash, and delivered pizzas all before the age of 20. Not thrilling work, but it can pay the rent.
  • watwut 7y ago
    A lot abuse went on through.
• roel_v 7y ago
  I have a home office (proper office with separate meeting room etc, a whole floor of our house) and I still get a babysitter on days school is out and I can't not work that day. It's just not the same when you have to always reserve some brain cycles for thinking about what's going on in the rest of the house. A few years ago (children must have been 5ish and 7ish?) my sitter cancelled last minute. So instead, I told my kids 'if you can play all morning, without fighting and screaming so loud that I can hear you, and not interrupting me, I'll pay you what I normally would have paid the baby sitter'. It was the first time they could make their own money, and it worked perfectly. I tried again a few days later and it failed and haven't had to try since. Maybe an idea for all those that now work from home the first time?
  • kyleee 7y ago
    Hah, but as you said it will probably only buy you one day (or a half day), so not exactly helpful long term
• fncypants 7y ago
  It seems that only once you have kids you realize how much of society that doesn't make sense to you is the way it is in order to accommodate the logistics of children and schooling.
  • imtringued 7y ago
    I don't understand this at all. As someone who doesn't have children it's the extreme opposite to me. Modern society is actively hostile to having children.
    • TeMPOraL 7y ago
      It's both. As a non-parent, you can have a vague, high-level idea about the demands of parenthood, but there's a lot of crucial and non-obvious details that aren't communicated to people without kids - mostly because it's either super boring or really tacit knowledge. So the parts of society that are run by parents tend to be kid-friendly; the parts run by childless are the opposite. Examples of nonobvious consequences of parenthood include: - Parents of pre-teens tend to be constantly late for everything. That's not because of lack of organization, but because the kid will randomly soil their clothes or do something else that needs to be taken care of immediately. - Parents are also constantly interrupted. Especially with the first kid, it seems everything is a life-threatening emergency, so the moment it even looks at you funny, you'll start calling your spouse at work to consult or coordinate a doctor's appointment. Some workplaces accommodate that (mostly those staffed by other parents), some don't. It becomes a question you start asking about on the interviews. - Say your company offers to send you to a conference or a training seminar. You'd probably jump at the occasion (yay, free education and zero responsibility, all on paid company time!), but you might be wondering why your coworkers all refuse to go, and don't even show any excitement about it. It's probably not because they're lazy, or just dispassionate 9-5 workers. It's likely because they're parents, and you can't just go to a conference as a parent. It's a huge logistical challenge. - Parents like big cars because of storage space. Going up and down the stairs with stuff gets tiring really fast, so you end up e.g. storing trolley and surplus diapers in the car. If you didn't want a car before, you'll start to want one now. This goes against the general trend of environmentally-conscious living. - If you aren't addicted to coffee yet you will be after having a child. You'll also learn that polyphasic sleep is a real thing (if it wasn't, nobody would survive the first months of parenthood). - You'll start talking about shit with other people. And I mean literal shit. - You'll bankrupt yourself if you try to buy everything new for the kid; you'll likely and out of a sudden become super frugal and very aware of all local clothes/items exchange/giveaway groups. - A babysitter isn't a luxury, it's mental healthcare in the city. I could go on and on, but it's late and my kid will wake up in about 5 hours. I'll be drinking an extra coffee tomorrow.
• projektfu 7y ago
  It sort of makes you wonder where we went wrong. Other social forms had children integrated into the things adults do.
  • Kaiyou 7y ago
    The part where it was made illegal for children to work. Humans had children integrated into the things adults do, too. I don't even get who pushed for this. It just alienates young adults from life, opening paths for them to turn to drugs and other destructive behaviors.
    • projektfu 7y ago
      The industrial revolution probably had something to do with it. No push for kids to stay out of work before that.
  • Barrin92 7y ago
    >It sort of makes you wonder where we went wrong when we moved from communal intergenerational lifestyles to the insular nuclear family. David brooks wrote a great piece about it. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuc...
    • projektfu 7y ago
      Yeah, I'm pretty convinced that you take a brain that is adapted to tribes and you force it into other structures and it stops working so well.
  • mac01021 7y ago
    If I could, in a sensible way, engage my 3-year-old in adding features with me to this springboot service, I totally would.
• slavapestov 7y ago
  > This falls under the same category. Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from home. Without child care or some place for the children to go, it's absolutely impossible to work from the office either, so I'm not sure what this means.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    For some non-parents, it's not obvious that being in the same room (or building) as the kid(s) is nowhere near enough. Small children in particular can only briefly occupy themselves; the rest of the time, they need your attention - and they will demand it, loudly. That last part was something I didn't internalize until I became a father myself. There's no "you do your stuff, and I'll be looking to make sure you won't hurt yourself" with small kids. They won't just do their stuff, they want you to do it with them. On top of that, once they learn to move (even just by rolling around the room), it's always 5 seconds from "everything is fine" to "the kid is trying to lick the electrical outlet".
• bad_user 7y ago
  We have a 9 year old. I wouldn't call it impossible, and I've been working from home on and off for quite some time. And no, my kid isn't traumatized. It does take some juggling with time, the 9 to 5 schedule no longer applies as you have to spend time during the day with your kid, but it's no worse than the random and useless meetings and conversations you have at work. And you have to be patient and expect interruptions. It can be done with some discipline. You shouldn't generalize.