Parents now spend twice as much time with their children as 50 years ago | Hacker News Reader

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

economist.com

394 pointselsewhen327 comments

"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....

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.

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.

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.

This is true not just from a kid's perspective too :)

Works well for aging parents!

I think that dependability is the key point. "My parents were never around" often translates to "my parents couldn't be relied on when it really matters". You don't have to spend 24/7 with your kids to establish the secure belief that you'll drop everything to help them; conversely, you can be present a great deal without ever giving the sense that you're a reliable resource.

I think this is what underpins the "dance recital" trope, or the similar "not getting picked up from soccer practice". It's not so much that you weren't there, but that you chose to prioritise something else or failed to honour a previous commitment.

Especially as children move into adolescence and start to develop independence, they want to know that their parents will provide a safe harbour to return to. I think that children are remarkably perceptive when assessing who can be trusted to get them out of a bad situation or handle a difficult conversation. Without necessarily realising it, parents send subtle messages every day about where their priorities really lie.

This, 100000 times : "Without necessarily realising it, parents send subtle messages every day about where their priorities really lie."

I think the interpretation of this is off. Less tired and less stressed translates to "more time with their parents".

Or perhaps more "quality" time. If a parent is too stressed or tired to give their full attention and engaging with a child, then this really does translate to wanting parents to work less.

I think this is ignoring the many people that grew up poor, where your parents weren't writing emails or stressed about work. But rather weren't constantly stressed about not paying the bills putting food on the table, or keeping the heat on.

I see this as an indictment of the common business management tactic world-wide to externalize the costs of rising expectations placed upon employees, without compensation, under the "do more with less" rubric. When even the children can see what is plainly in front of them, and express in honest language that their parents are bringing home work responsibilities and concerns, then the economic platform should be re-examined.

I find one of the most effective ways to do more with less is to ignore work after work, enjoy my life and show up the next day well rested and not stressed.

If it's important you'll get a call. When I do work at a place that prides itself on people being available around the clock, i'll delay send / reply to something right before bed and then plugging in my phone in another room.

Gives the appearance of working the most hours, interrupts other people / ruins their sleep, doesn't really affect my life in any material way.

> I find one of the most effective ways to do more with less is to ignore work after work

It's a shame that the concept of "having a life" as we pejoratively said in the 90s seems to have been forgotten.

Hah. Are you aware that there used to be a phrase everyone knew referred to as a 'speed-up'? It was the opposite side of the coin of a work slowdown. Everyone knows what a slowdown is. It's when workers try to get higher wages or apply pressure on their employer by intentionally working more slowly. And it used to be equally universally known that the opposite side of the coin was equally immoral and disgusting - for an employer to expect a worker to produce more value without the employer having to pay more for it.

That used to be something that society would spit in the face of the fat pigs for. But, now, it's considered sensible everyday practice that none would question. Of course Walmart lets the government shoulder a portion of the compensation of their workers through food stamps. Of course the fact technology enabled employees to produce 40% more value this year results in a raise of 1 or 2%, less than the cost of living increased. Of course they take and take and feel absolutely entitled to every penny of the billions in profit.

At the same time they claim to believe in the principles of a free market. At the same time the free market principles declare that all profit is a mistake, that all profit should quickly go to zero in any sensible market. Huh. Imagine that.

The 'Free market principle' does not necessarily imply zero profits. It's more along the line of: The profits should stay in line with the risks that the enterprise needs to take. More risky business sectors should (e.g. more upfront investments required) produce higher profits. Same as riskier bonds commanding a premium over t-bills.

But I agree that a lot of big players have managed to position themselves outside any 'free markets'

That's wildly speculative.

That seems to resonate with me. I might want a little more time with my parents, but quite honestly, I'd rather they were less stressed and tired. Unfortunately, they are pretty headstrong so nothing I say would ever change their hours.

"Wish for" != "what is good for you"

It doesn’t surprise me that kids don’t actually want to spend every waking moment with their parents.

Obviously this varies by age but they are little sentient beings who have their own agendas.

I have no idea why anyone would expect them to want the same one or two people in their mental space during every moment of “free” time.

Exactly. As a teenager I was more than happy to have my parents spend the day at work, as long as work-related stress didn't get brought back. It would have been quite annoying if they were around me all the time.

This lead me to think: "Parents now spend twice as much time with their children as 50 years ago" - well no wonder parents seem stressed and overworked!

Time for bedtime routine for my two children: 3-4 hours every evening.

You know, it doesn’t have to be this way. Make parenting work for you. After all, simply by making your children, you’ve already given them the incredible gift of life. There’s no need to also spend every waking hour attending to them.

What does the bedtime routine entail? I've never heard of such a long routine.

It's totally different as a teenager. Under age 5 kids are very emotionally dependent on their parents being around (even when not otherwise "needed").

From the linked blogpost: > My interpretation: Spending time with our kids has become a chore because we're doing so much of it.

What a bizarre speculation, clearly a case of motivated reasoning. It's equally plausible that parents are working too hard/long and so when they see their kids they are cranky and irritable in the few moments they have with their children, and kids naturally want their parents to be better company before they become more frequent/enduring company. If parents had so much excess time hanging out with their kids, as the blogger wildly speculates, they probably wouldn't be so stressed and tired.

Your explanation is not supported by the data.

Firstly, the headline figure is that parents are spending twice as much time with their children, so this isn't simply a case of family time being squeezed by time spent at working.

Secondly, the average number of hours worked has been stable or slightly declining, with all but the most highly educated men seeing a reduction in working hours. Reductions in the amount of non-market work (shopping, household chores etc) mean that there has been a substantial increase in the amount of discretionary leisure time enjoyed by the average American. More women are participating in the labor market, but labor market participants of both genders enjoy significantly more leisure time.

Most Americans have more free time than ever before and are choosing to spend more of it with their children. The one exception is amongst the most highly educated, which (given the demographics of HN) may be why this fact jars with your personal experience.

https://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2006/wp0602.pdf

Isn't this actually the same thing, but from a grown-up perspective and from a child perspetive? If I say I want to work less, I would imply that I would be less stressed.

I wonder if the age ranges were well-represented.

What I thought when I was 5 about my parents and what I thought when I was 13 were two totally different things.

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.

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.

But probably different people. Communities are very capable of holding conflicting viewpoints.

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.

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.

I hope you can appreciate the irony of ranting about angry people :)

The post to which you are replying is not a rant by any reasonable definition of the term and what 'rjzzleep is saying should (probably won't, but should) be taken to heart.

In what world are angry people necessary bad? Or negative people?

And no, positively minded people are not necessary good people. That is absurd claim.

"People that are happy about the way something is, are less likely to complain about it."

I did not made that claim nor wanted to. Which is why II contrasted it with other topics, so that it is clearer that parenting is treated differently.

Lastly, your comment seems to be the only negative reaction. As of now, there is not even comment disagreeing with me (which would be different then negative of course).

Your comment does look indeed angry and negative :)

Wow, you completely redefine what they're saying and then attack your own redefinition.

"People that are happy about the way something is, are less likely to complain about it."

This isn't even what OP was arguing. It's more along the line of "People that are happy are less likely to voice that satisfaction than people that are unhappy are likely to voice their dissatisfaction".

Are you angry and negative about the negativity of the opinions expressed on the internet?

^ This.

You've been violating the guidelines a lot. Could you please take a look and stop?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Had it been the opposite (half as much time), people would be accusing parents of outsourcing childcare.

It's not exactly strange for "X time allocation has doubled" and "X time allocation has halved" to both be bad.

If we back off the argument to looking at smaller changes, and truly looking at whether less or more is better... I'm not sure if parenting is special here. Maybe it's just that it's really easy to think of examples where people do too much, and examples where people do too little. So a change in either direction is a bad thing for those people, especially if they're more prone to follow along the way they were already going.

>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."

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.

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!

From personal experience, you will soon transition to making dad jokes.

I do it daily. I'm hilarious (to no one but myself).

> 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 :)

Haha I mean professional comedians.

Also, I took pictures of baby peeing on himself to show to his future dates. Can't wait!

Even if you lose the pictures, DAD can still tell the story. It has the same effect ;)

Before you do that, remember that they choose your retirement home.

My father deliberately didn't take those sort of photos for exactly this reason: he knew my mother would use them to humiliate my brother and I as we got older.

Ah, well it does now look a lot more like a joke :-)

I have bad news for you. Getting a newborn to sleep is child's play. Try getting two 5ish year olds off to school in the morning. It's basically impossible!

Every morning, our 3-year-old wakes up and says, "I don't want to go to school!" Then when mom goes to pick him up from school, she can't get him to leave. Good times.

That sounds pretty judge-y. ;-)

I imagine that faced with your first newborn, one might logically assume that there would be periods where the child slept leaving some time for other activities. In reality, the only "hobby" the new parent will want to engage under those conditions is getting some sleep.

In my experience newborns sleep a lot. For a breastfeeding mother it's pretty exhausting and requires a lot more sleep. And the nights can be pretty broken, not as broken as they will be over the next few years in general though!

I remember that. A newborn who didn't want to sleep, no matter the hour, and parents so far into sleep deprivation that the only thing that mattered was sleep. I'm not sure how a baby that's supposed to sleep 18 hours a day can be awake all night, but... it certainly seems that way. Looking back, trying to make a baby sleep is like pushing a rope. It only works when they want to.

If you can, tag team. For at least a while, let the baby's sleep schedule be what it is, and just hand off every few hours so someone can sleep. If that's in the dark hours, great. If not, you'll be tired enough anyway that it doesn't matter.

Also, sleep when they sleep. If you think you can do chores in the first weeks think again.

Or months with twins.

you will be much happier if you accept that being a father is, at least, a 12-hour/day job and not try to rush things. Your kid can pick up on your anxiety and will not react well to being rushed.

Feeling the weight of your little baby in your arms is fleeting so try to really experience it.

After he falls asleep in your lap you can put on some headphones and look at your phone.

From now on getting off the clock at your dayjob is just hour #1 of your night job.

I remember the first time I noticed my son reacting to my mood, that was game-changing for me :( I felt really terrible, and have been more careful about revealing distress to him.

Obviously you can't just hide all your feelings, but I now try not to be as frustrated about things that I can't help.

Accepting that my needs come second and just generally trying to make things smooth for my son has made our relationship so much better.

I used to think that I would be able to get an hour or two of work done when he was asleep,but the result was never good. I was stressed out after my third month of paternity leave. For the remaining months (we get 195 days to use as we please at 80% pay in Sweden) I just called down and learned to be happy with my day if we managed to

1. Walk the dog for at least one 1-2hr walk

2. Have some kind of social inreraction with grown-ups.

I now just sleep/relax whenever he's sleeping. Good days he sleeps a good 3hr mid day, and those days I try to get things done, but depending on how the night was sometimes I just do 3hr of relaxing and doing things that I know are good for me.

I got 15 days and thought it was generous.

I was offered the 12 weeks of unpaid leave mandated by the government. I ended up using 10 of my PTO days.

Northern Europe social democracy has it's perks.

We get 195 days/parent at 80% pay (my union has however negotiated an extra 10% if I take most of those days consecutive during the first two years after the child was born).

Then we get an extra 45 days/parent with something like 100-150 SEK/day.

Until this year there was an extra bonus when the parental leave was shared equally between parents, so we got an extra 15k SEK (~$2k).

Dude, newborn stage is when you can get the MOST done. Especially if you hit the sleep training hard and early (warning: depending on your kid's temperament this may mean listening to them cry a ton at night for as much as a week—with ours it was more like 3 nights. Early means 8-12 weeks, later and it'll be harder) and keep them on a sleep/feed schedule (strongly, strongly recommended—if you don't they will switch their days/nights around and make your life a living hell. This means waking them from naps to feed when it's feeding time, which I know may seem crazy but trust me). Even if you totally screw up the whole sleep thing, they're still only awake like 20-25% of the day. I hate be the bearer of bad news but ages 2-4 are oh so much worse.

If the kid's starting to eagerly take bottles then pulling away screaming it could be reflux. If they're also screaming as if in great pain when placed in certain positions (say, in their crib instead of upright in your arms) it's really bad reflux, and/or it's been going on a while. All three of ours and like 1/2 the other kids in my circle of friends had issues with it. If it's bad and untreated it'll fuck up their esophagus (fixable, but it'll hurt 'em for a while) and make sleep training and feeding both horrible. Happened to our first, didn't know the signs and doctors at first were like "LOL it's fine first time parent, you're just an idiot", cleared up fast (better in like 48 hours, way better inside a week, even better with later ones where they didn't have esophageal damage) once we got meds. Get that shit fixed and feeding/sleep issues will be way easier to manage (they're impossible if you don't).

Newborn stage is way worse for women unless you use formula, of course. They're never more than like an hour from another feeding or pumping, seems like. Even at night.

On the bright side, be aware that to someone with three kids, temporarily only having to care for only one kid for some reason (others with wife, others with parents, whatever) basically feels like having no kids. So freakin' easy. So if you aren't having a good time now... god, don't have more, they're a multiplier on the difficulty. Going from one to two is rough. Two to three's not better. I hear it levels off after that but don't know first hand.

So know that I envy how laughably easy you have it. That should make you feel better, right? :-)

Seriously, the first one's a bit of a shock to the system, which I well remember, and I don't envy you. Good luck! 6m-18m is pretty damn cool provided you get the sleep stuff sorted out before then. So you have that to look forward to. Before they turn into horrible little entropy demons :-(

Tip: use orange spectrum lighting exclusively after sunset in the house. Huge benefit.

I would also suggest finding a quiet, dark place near your house where you can go on a walk with your infant. As I walked around the neighborhood, she went from refershed by the air, to a bit annoyed that she wasn't able to move around much - I'm sure some neighbors heard protest crying - to dazed and then resigned to close the eyes. I got upwards of 10,000 steps every night just walking around with her, and learned a lot about myself from trying to get her to fall asleep -- pre-bedtime quiet activities, orange/dim lighting, 62-68 degrees and keeping a very dark bedroom. Also, having someone nearby can also help, possibly singing quietly or giving a gentle massage, which can lower cortisol levels. Breastfeeding has also helped us a lot, something as a father you can't do, but a warm bottle can help. Bouncing on yoga balls also worked for us (I went to a hotel's gym just for the ball once). It gets much better though, brave it out for the first year if you can! My 13-month old daughter now goes into the bed on her own when she gets tired and sleeps for long stretches on her own.

These are great suggestions, but I am going to add my own, as an experienced mother of three. Whenever the getting-to-sleep process starts, once you've gotten comfortable, baby in arms or in the stroller, you have to let your mind wander, even if you're rocking or singing a little sleepy song. Babies can tell when you're sitting there thinking "is he asleep yet? how about now? what if we're up all night?" As long as your attention is in the room, the baby will be alert. Cast your mind outside of the house, think about the yard and the street, then just let your thoughts wander, almost as if you yourself were drifting off. You'll be boring, and the baby will fall asleep.

I agree with this. For our kids, I've been the one that's most successful with quick sleep times, and my wife and I believe it's largely driven with our different mental energies during that time.

I'm a night owl, so don't feel pressure to rush it, and just settle in for the long haul and relax and daydream myself, planning to finish my day once the kids are good and settled. My wife gets tired at night and spends the time tallying her remaining chores and work that needs finished before she can get to bed herself, and the kids then tend to not settle down.

It's harder now with our 3 year old, who uses mama's hair as her bedtime lovie.

I learnt from psychologist that there are ways to help newborn to get asleep.

Newborn is in a very uncomfortable conditions for him. He used to be in a liquid environment. It was very noisy environment: there was a lot of sounds made by mothers body, digesting and more importantly heartbeat. It was dark there. But now he is on the air, he need to breathe, he hears silence with interruptions by some sharp sounds (in the belly sounds are different, I think there are no high frequences), and there are lights. Moreover first year baby experiences difficultes with thermoregulation of his body. Probably there are more things that trouble him, I'm not pretending to give you a full list.

Give him "heartbeat", give him a smell of his mother, ensure he is experiencing comfortable temperature, and he, probably, would get quiet. Try it with real mother first, let her take him, lay his head near her heart. If it works, get mother's dirty T-shirt and place it near nose of a baby. You can also try find some audio track, which makes your baby happy by sounding similarly enough to a heartbeat. The psychologist told a story of mother, who liked to walk near railways: her crying baby stopped cry every passed train, because he experienced noise level he used to. Moreover that was rythmic noise, like heartbeat. I don't think it is good idea to reach such levels of noise indoors at night, but you got an idea: do not make silence in his room, let it be some constant rythmic noise.

Though it does not work every time. Sometimes baby just don't want to sleep and get bored. But not in first few weeks: the first few weeks for him is a constant suffering of adaptation to a completely alien environment.

Why do people write ‘baby’ or ‘newborn’ with no article like that? Surely it’s ‘a baby’ or ‘the baby’ or ‘your baby’ or maybe ‘babies’ if you mean in general. Just ‘baby’ sounds like broken English. You wouldn’t write ‘manager sent me an email’, you’d write ‘my manager’ or something like that with an article.

The whole comment is written with fewer articles than you'd expect for good English - my guess is that the commenter is not a native speaker, rather than trying to be cutesy.

Now that's the real difference between a native and a non-native speaker: As a non-native speaker, I'd probably put about the right amount of articles in there, but I can't even imagine why dropping them sounds 'cutesy'. Probably most of my sentences randomly project 'cutesy' or 'geeky' or 'obnoxious'. And it happens on a subconscious level even if you know that I'm not a native speaker.

Referring to "a baby" as "baby" is cutesy because it kind of treats "baby" as a name, or perhaps because it immitates the way young children talk. In normal circumstances dropping articles just makes you sound foreign.

> sounds like broken English

There are many languages (notably Slavic ones) that don't have articles. My guess is that the comment author is a native speaker of one of those languages and not English.

Lots of native English speakers write ‘baby’ without an article.

As a native speaker of a Slavic language I can confirm that articles are something that I often seem to be getting wrong when I am writing (and speaking) English.

They seem like an unneeded extra, from the perspective of Slavic languages, where the information that they give is most often easily inferred from the context or the construction of the sentence.

Indian languages also lack articles - my mother immigrated to USA over 30 years ago and I still have to add in articles sometimes when I proofread something she writes.

I'm really glad to get feedback from English native. I'm even more happy because your feedback confirms my expectations: articles are really hard for me, because my first language does not have them.

I'm a Spanish native speaker and I also have problems with articles, but it seems like I have the opposite problem, it seems like Spanish uses articles more often than English, so I usually add them when they are not required, maybe not grammatically incorrect but sometimes I could sound kinda weird.

To be fair, some English speakers will say baby to mean a particular unnamed infant. For example, a midwife or childcare adviser will talk about what to do "when baby gets home" or "If baby is hungry.." etc.

There's also the whole "Back To Sleep" anti-SIDS campaign, which is just murder on their sleep. Our kids just totally refused to cooperate so we gave up and let them sleep on their stomachs.

Could not reproduce.

There are kids books that at least might trigger a smile (very much more for the parents): https://amzn.com/1617750255

Hang in there!

I'd recommend a Swingomatic...but they don't make them any more. This is about the same thing: https://www.amazon.com/Graco-Slim-Spaces-Compact-Swing/dp/B0...

> I thought paternity leave was going to be chill

I've heard this from a few people, and I don't understand it. The whole idea of paternity leave is to allow you to care for a newborn -- it's not supposed to be a vacation!

I think a lot of fathers-to-be imagine their newborns spending most of the time sleeping, leaving lots of time for work/learning/whatever. In reality, it's rather unlikely you'll be getting more than a few hours sleep yourself!

My kid would fall asleep 100% in the car. Heck there were times when I would take her for a drive precisely for this purpose. After five minutes driving she would fall asleep.

I then used to take out the car seat with her so not to wake her up.

Hate to tell you, but time requirements only go up from newborn stage.

Personally, I'm glad fatherhood is evolving. I love spending time with my son. I just tell myself to try and enjoy what I can, because at somepoint, it'll be different, and I will miss it.

Congrats on being a dad, btw.

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.

Per #2, families are much smaller on average now so even if they count that way, I don't think that would contribute much.

Related to families changing structure: what about step-parents?

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.

Interested in the age range as well. Huge difference between infants, prek, k-middle school and beyond.

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

[2] https://news.uci.edu/2016/09/28/todays-parents-spend-more-ti...

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.

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.

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 :(

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.

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)?

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.

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.

This was my experience - after removing apps / block there would be an initial period where I would stick to it, but eventually would fall back to the same old routine. Changing engrained habits is extremely difficult.

Ya the camera is the biggest issue, and I'll admit I do rely on my wife having her smartphone handy for capturing those unexpected moments. I do carry a small point and shoot (older model from 2009), but I am looking at upgrading it to a newer model. I find that because it isn't always handy, my photos of kids, events, etc. are more purposeful (some would say posed I guess), which depending on your point of view could be a plus.

I think I need to give this a try. I may have to put my phone in a "dead zone" box or something when I get home so that I can be off and present with them.

I like the idea of turning on a ringtone so I can be reached but also not always surfing youtube/facebook/hacker news/etc. I don't know why but getting my computer out to do something seems a lot more effort and I'm less likely to do it.

I'm going to try this out tonight and go for 2 weeks to see how it goes. I'll re-assess then.

Thanks your comment was the impetuous I needed to figure out a way to do it without getting rid of the smart phone the rest of the day.

Another thing to try is put the phone on a shelf with car keys when you get home, and only pick it up after the kids are in bed. The feeling of "phantom phone" and the desire to check it are real. I totally empathise with you.

My 11 month old already sees my iPhone as a threat and goes for it with his teeth whenever he sees me using it. Or he just wants to play with it himself; at anyrate it is very difficult to use my phone around him now.

I think you are making a joke but it is the latter case. He see you using it so he knows it must be important! and his primary tool for figuring out the world is his mouth!

I actually think it might be the former. There's a famous study where parents put on a completely flat face for a few minutes and denied their infants any attention. The babies reacted extremely poorly. I wish I could remember the name of the effect & the study so I could link it but the name totally escapes me

Anyway, point being, they did the same study but with parents using smartphones, and babies reacted in exactly the same fashion (distress)

I have the same problem with my cats.

For me the solution was to make my phone super boring. It's basically a dumbphone with WhatsApp (because where I live WhatsApp == texting). It does have a browser but I can't get to it easily (basically i have to start some other app and trick it into starting a browser). No social networks. No games, etc. Maps is the most interactive app on my phone, by far. All that other stuff is for the computer.

This works well for me (except weird quirks eg I sometimes take my laptop to the toilet). It forces me to consciously choose to "dive in" (because opening a computer takes a bit more time as well as physical space).

Two of my buddies had kids when they were 19-20, when I see one of them his daughter is basically watching youtube videos all the time sitting on the couch.

The other guy does not really let his kids around phones or tablets, they can watch TV, but thats also heavily regulated. But usually when we are around, they hang out with us and work on cars. Its really fun to teach them stuff about cars even if they are only 5 and 6. When we sit and have meals, I try to engage them as much as possible, talk about music, and math.

But yes I agree with you, phones are really killing it. Have you tried deleting apps you like to use? Switch to web apps with difficult logins?

on a side note does anyone else find those youtube videos for kids hella creepy?

Not sure which ones, but my friend's five-year-old girl spends her time watching videos of and older girl showing off her Brand-Name Doll, and all the accessories you can buy for it, and how isn't it just so cute when I put her in THIS accessory, and tune in tomorrow for more accessories you can buy...

That definitely makes me sick.

At least the older one is being productive and producing content. Hey, there are some silly YouTubers who make real money from just streaming their life (games, fashion, etc).

Arguably, what they’re doing is better than sitting in front of a passive device like a TV. Sure, they could be spending their time more wisely, but the kids need some sort of down time (exactly how much time is for the parents to figure out).

> Arguably, what they’re doing is better than sitting in front of a passive device like a TV.

But the example given was of a child semi-actively watching ads, for hours and hours. Is that better than watching, say, Sesame Street?

True, but in the 1970s when I was a kid, I watched a lot of Saturday Morning cartoons which had a lot of toy ads, and my father's comic books had toy ads too. Selling crap to children too young to understand advertising has a long history.

yeah I remember seeing those ads when I was a child as well, however I think that the invasiveness has increased. the children have this "relationship" with people on youtube, where the youtuber addresses the whole audience, but in a way that children might perceive as friendliness, while the intentions may not be so genuine.

> on a side note does anyone else find those youtube videos for kids hella creepy?

Yes, and there was a recent discussion on HN about it, too [0].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15670109

Parents are beat. Both my now ex-wife and I had a burnout in the last 2 years. Work demands are higher than ever and our kids were also demanding. /edit The reason we're on our phones is that we're just too damn tired to interact with humans properly.

>Work demands are higher than ever

I suspect you meant this within the context of your own life, but historically that's almost certainly untrue. 50 years ago you likely would've had a job doing much more grueling work in less comfortable conditions. Conversely, your ex-wife would not have had an income producing job at all and after the age of 4-5 would've sent the kid outside for significant portions of the day.

More grueling work, but likely left AT work. No bringing work home with you. Likely less job stress at home as well, though it might be replace by financial stress.

'grueling' is key. Since I don't do any 'real' work I need to go to the gym pretty regularly to keep my mind / body sane.

Do you have any insight on the "after age 4-5"?

My youngest is nearly 2 and can hold his own on a parking field, at a playpark, in a woodland, digging in the garden, etc.. Seems early 20th Century kids would be out there at an earlier age, certainly working class kids.

That's definitely the modern day problem! Can't believe how often you go to playgrounds and a parent is on their phone the entire time. It makes me self conscious every time I need to use my phone for something important, as I don't want to be that parent although I have been in the past. I removed the Facebook app from my phone and that's helped, among removing push notifications, putting it on silent etc... phone addiction is a real problem, as is social media consumption.

When you are on a safe playground you don't need to watch your child all the time. I read books at that time.

Oh yeah I'm not really concerned about safety, I'm assuming parents are being responsible in that regard. My concern is social interaction, and parents staring at their phones and not even interacting with other parents. I get not all people like to socialize all the time, and finding alone time to read a book is rare as a young parent... but it's nice to just chat with people and put the phones away. I'm an introvert by nature so I like alone time.

If a parent is reading a book, I totally respect that! You don't see lots of people walking and reading a book everywhere they go, staring at a book to avoid social conversation, or unable to put it down for more than 6 minutes... phones just seem to takeover the brain, like TV but worse.

My city was 95% of the parents just on phones till this year. Now the vast majority of us parents are actually playing with our kids. Serious kids are the best thing I have ever had in my life and they are a blast. Sometimes they really know how to humble you but it is so worth it. (Dad of 5)

That's really cool!

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?

> 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.

> 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.

> [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.

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.]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

When I was a kid, in the 80s, our public schools were half-day kindergarten as well (Washington).

Same for me, in North Texas. Born in the '80s, went to kindergarten in 1990-91.

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)

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/summer-born-children-to-g...

Yeah, I should have clarified. The terms actually originates from college sports in the US. Its a way for academic freshman to practice with a team but maintain 4 years of athletic eligibility.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirt_(college_sports)

> Kindergarten redshirting

Shifting age eligibility probably had a bigger effect than redshirting.

Another guess: More time with parents might correlate to less time with other family members. Grandparents and other immediate family are working and living longer which means parents don't have free childcare and do it themselves.

How about

1. Increase in private schools: no school bus for kiddo, but a parent as chauffeur. (A woman I knew claimed to have done 200 miles per day for some period. She had four kids.)

2. Increase in organized sports from an early age. Again, a parent as chauffeur, bystander, and sometimes coach or assistant coach.

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.

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).

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

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

Out of all the people I know, those who seem to worry about everything they encounter were all trained in psychology or sociology.

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 :/

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.

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.

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

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.

Lol. I thought I'm the only one. We're they dispossessed of their children before or what?

This kinda makes methodology dubious.

The study only had two data points for Denmark, and extrapolated the rest from that.

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.

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

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.

Is there any evaluation of quality vs quantity?

Technology adds more and more distractions, reducing effects of physical presence.

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.

Somehow I don't think that tilling land with a baby strapped to your back would be counted as 'spending time with'...

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.

How much time compared to 300 years 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.

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.

Even if true, it was probably unintentional.

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

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.

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

Quantity != Quality.

I read patents

Wow! That's an amazing stat!

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.

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)

You appear to be describing the difference between a communist society and a capitalist one.

The elders, and everyone, helps to raise the child in the "agrarian" because they realise the benefit acrues to all of society, and they have humanity; the modern way is to not do it because you can do other stuff that makes you more profit and puts you ahead of the others.

People in "The West" are much more involved in competing against other people rather than cooperating with them.

You appear to be confusing communist with agricultural and capitalist with industrial.

I don't think so, just trying to use the context of "agrarian village life" that the parent used. The point is that Capitalism provides a framework in which time, and particularly action, is linked directly to financial recompense and in which profit motive - rather than other firms of value - is lauded most highly. That moves away from community spirit, cooperation, fostering others, and towards greater emphasis on individual monetary wealth (and consumption that indicates such wealth).

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

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.

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.

Weekends.

Dad used to fiddle in the basement or go golfing, now he goes to soccer practice or the park.

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 ...

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....

When one parent is working (or relaxing) at home all day, and the children are at school, the parent isn't spending time with the child.

What? Working 8 hours a day leaves about 8 hours of freetime to spend with your kids even leaving 8 hours for sleep. Even if you change the numbers there is plenty of time to spent, it is just matter of prioritizing.

This doesn’t make any sense. Kid wakes up at 7:00, you have 1 hour for breakfast and to get ready for school/work. Then you’re back home at 6:00 and you’ll have another hour for dinner and getting your kid ready for bed. So this leaves about 30 minutes to spend time playing with your kid on an average weekday.

Working from home is really common these days. Almost everyone in my friends/family works from home at-least couple of days a week.

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

And yet people wonder why children grow up to be completely unprepared for the world...

“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...

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.

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

So free ranging is not decreasing in all countries, just a few.

Corner store? You mean the Mega-lo-mart only accessibly after hopping on the free way?

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.

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.

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).

There was always some stigma against free-range parenting (think the grocery store scene in Home Alone) but it's gotten much, much worse

What we would now call "free range parenting" was normal until recently.

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.

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.... [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.

Depends on your neighbors and your neighborhood. Definitely not a universal, but it can fit an existential.

"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-...

I'll just go let my best friend know that the several CPS inspections she had to endure last year when she left her kids at the park unattended were not real.

Anyone can call CPS for just about anything, and having someone pick through your home and point out every little flaw, with the threat of taking your kids away is a real issue. Please don't downplay it, and don't downplay how shitty people can be to each other.

I'm not very familiar with how CPS works and the law there--do you have any right to refuse unless they present some evidence that warrants such invasive next steps?

Seems like a passive-aggressive parental version of Swatting someone.

Don’t know what it’s like on the “receiving end” but in my state when I notify CPS it’s a very, very involved process that usually takes at least an hour. You can do it by phone or internet form and both require extensive information about the child, parents, family members, address, etc. It’s definitely not something you can just do because you don’t like your neighbors and want them arrested in five minutes.

I agree with the spirit of your argument, but I am pretty sure that this actually has happened.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/13/parent...

[1] 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.

I do think the lose-your-kids-to-CPS fear is a little overblown. But it's a little silly to say "they didn't call CPS, they called the police". The outcome is the same, and people almost always call the police instead of CPS directly.

The original comment I was responding to specifically said “you can have CPS called on” you. Many people then pointed out the case of the Meitiv family even though nobody called CPS on them. Somebody called the police because they saw children playing in a parking garage unattended. Nobody called the police and said “the Meitiv’s children are playing in the neighborhood unattended.”

"you can have CPS called on you" doesn't imply a direct relationship between the reporter and CPS. The end result is the what matters.

I think it does. The statement is very clear and straight forward. It is a different statement than “you could be investigated by CPS for leaving your child on a parking garage.”

A quick Googling says otherwise. Here's one of many. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/protective-services-called-on-m...

This literally happened to me last week in Fresno, CA at @dmpayton's house. Fortunately, it's not possible to directly call CPS here; one needs to go through the police first. The police arrived and questioned me. I explained to them that I had no intention of changing my behavior and that I didn't want to answer any questions. They were polite and eventually left.

But it was still bizarre. I don't understand why the response (to the caller) isn't, "M'am, there's no violation of the law in your description of this event. Please keep this line open in case of actual emergencies."

Yes, you will.

http://reason.com/blog/2015/06/11/11-year-old-boy-played-in-... http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/neighbor-calls-cops... https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/22/canadian-mo...

Do you have any more "corrections" to make?

That first one (the only one I read) is such a nightmare. Just wow.

I live in the boonies and my kid gets to roam far and wide by himself. There's some risk involved, but it's never crossed my mind that I'm being negligent.

I think it would be more negligent to keep him indoors--not that it could qualify as criminally negligent in any sane universe.

When I was 6 years old my mom used to let me ride my bike all over town (a 5 mile jaunt) all day long. When I was 8, me and my friends used to walk 4 miles to school to play basketball, then spend rest of day playing in woods. Eventually when I was around 13 one of my friends lost an eye due to our experiments with explosives, but other than that we all survived.

Maybe I should call CPS on my mom. What's the statute of limitations.

I used to go to my friend's house when I was 8. It was through the woods, across the railroad tracks, and about 2 miles down a fairly busy residential road with no sidewalks. By 13 I went anywhere I wanted. Even on the city bus or whatever.

Most of my life the rule was "be home by dinner" (6pm)

Also I stayed home alone and watched my little sister after about age 11. I had a single father.

My friends and I also played with explosives--we got into one buddy's father's black powder stash--but the only casualties were one guy's eyebrows. And his pride, once his mother noticed.

I think your citations are instances of confirmation bias; also, you're only citing a handful of examples, and they're examples so extreme they made national news. (They're also each a year apart.)

Even in large cities kids roam alone in their neighborhoods and parks. I live in SF, and regularly see kids under 10 skateboarding or riding their bikes on their own around my neighborhood. Now that I'm a parent, I also see toddlers running around fields in GG Park, barely within in earshot of their parents.

Odds are, if you don't see kids running around your neighborhood, it's either because you live in a neighborhood without many children (like most of SF), or you tend to be at work during the hours in which most children play.

It's unfortunate, but it happens regularly in today's world.

Everyone is pointing out various news articles that show that people do indeed call CPS when you let your kids play by themselves at a playground. I won't dispute that it happens, but to me this is similar to how we view other low-probability events. If I let my kids walk to school or the playground by themselves there's also a chance they can get hit by a car crossing the street. I can teach them safety rules and arm them with the tools they need, but there's always that chance. If you were so inclined I'm sure you could find countless articles about unsupervised kids getting hit by cars (or whatever other horrible thing you wanted to dig up, child abduction, etc etc). And yet that's a low-probability risk that we readily accept for the trade-off of fostering a child's independence and not being held hostage by every small risk in this world. Some asshole calling CPS and causing serious annoyance and maybe even emotional trauma is a real risk, but I'd argue it's super low probability (lower than the risk cars on the street pose). So yes, it happens, but that doesn't mean we have to change our behavior. We just have to accept that risk just like we do thousands of others in the course of daily life.

Many are sharing personal experiences as well.

I have not had CPS called on me. But I do have friends who dealt with that. In fact I know more people whose had CPS called on them than I do people who have been in car accidents. So it doesn't seem to be a super low probability event.

What also has me concerned is that my kids are heading towards puberty. Over 1/4 of all registered sex offenders committed their crime while minors. The single year of your life that you are most likely to become a registered sex offender is 14. It is massively more likely that they will have their lives destroyed that way than by an accident.

I would definitely not call car accidents a low probability event.

What? Please explain how a minor can become a registered sex offender. I'm not American, sometimes America just confuses us foreigners.

You now qualify if you (as a 14 year old) send a nude selfie to someone else. Manufacture & distribution, something like that.

We (rational Americans) are as perplexed as you are how that could possibly qualify.

https://forum.freeadvice.com/juvenile-law-90/mooning-sexual-...

A bit off-topic: I've been in 12 car accidents, I think. 2 while I was driving a car, neither my fault. One while I was driving a motorcycle, also not my fault.

Most were before I was old enough to be driving.

5 of the vehicles were totaled, including the motorcycle.

Anyway I find it strange that some people have never been in one. I'm not sure I know anyone who hasn't.

That is crazy. When you say they were 'not your fault', how not your fault were they? Sometimes things aren't your fault, but you could also drive more defensively and expect other people to mess up. Sometimes things are not your fault and there is nothing you could do, like when you are stopped at a stoplight.

In the three accidents where I was driving:

A ford explorer in front of me on a 2-lane road going about 45mph turned into an apartment complex, then used their drive to do a big sweeping U turn back across my lane, and through a stop sign (for the driveway people turning onto the main road). I was 17 years old but I don't fault myself for not driving more defensively. The guy just turned into the apartments, when he swooped back out I swerved but it was all very quick. That's not something you're prepared to defend for until you've seen it happen, frankly.

The next one was very minor, but we had two left-hand turn lanes and we were approaching a traffic light. I was in the right-hand lane, with no cars directly in front of me. I had a red car to my left, and a black car in front of him. The light turned yellow, and the black car was going to stop. The red car swerved quickly into my lane to go around the black car, and he clipped the front of my car. It knocked off a light cover, but otherwise no real damage. He ran the light and did not stop. There was no time to react, he literally yanked his wheel over, and I could not swerve right anyway, as there were vehicles there.

On the motorcycle, I was driving on a two-lane road behind a large vehicle, I think it was an SUV. Someone was waiting to turn left in the opposite lane (so they wanted to turn across our lane). There were many cars behind me as well. The person didn't see me and turned after the SUV passed. They stopped halfway through the turn, by which time I had already put down the bike while slamming on the brakes. The bike hit the car and totaled, and I slid down my lane with virtually no injuries. I was fairly well equipped so I just had a couple of very minor scrapes. She had no insurance. This accident was most avoidable in theory. Perhaps I could have positioned myself better, and she might have seen me. But probably not. I could not have swerved around her, though, unless I anticipated her stopping halfway. If she didn't stop halfway, and I swerved right, I would have gone through her passenger window. If I swerved left, it was a head-on collision.

During all of the other accidents, I was not the driver.

Well, maybe the OP means a car accident that wasn't a small fender bender with damage to 1 car or no damage to either. Or they are young or live in a city with not many cars.

I am not sure what the sex offender thing had to do with CPS being called on you. Were you giving another example of a low probability event?

> You won’t have CPS called on you for letting your children wander and play in the neighbor. Please don’t spread nonsense.

You're absolutely wrong and I know first hand of a couple of neighbors where exactly this has happened.

Just because you haven't experienced it first hand it doesn't mean you have proof positive that it never occurs.

Growing up I was allowed to roam the grounds of wherever we were freely unsupervised. As with many of us gen-Y'ers. In spending time with various women with kids I have noticed that parents nowadays are way more likely

a) hover over their children (in a playground for example) so as to be no more than 10-20 feet away from them at all times

b) eyeing any adults in the play area without a nearby child suspiciously

c) Occasionally chastising or otherwise harassing parents that don't do this, in the same way that nosy people chastise others over their actions.

Given the prevalence of stories and my own observations, I think you are wrong. I also think the quality of the institutions being talked about vary greatly depending on where you are. When I was in high school my friend had CPS called on her parents after a particularly nasty fight (her family was prone to loud fights) and it took them a couple weeks to convince CPS to get off their backs.

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.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/07/arreste...

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.

Fathers can't be involved if they aren't around.

Single motherhood rate in 1950: 5%

Single motherhood rate in 2010: 41%

Fathers can be around without being married to the mother.

From a technical perspective sure. From a statistical perspective, the point is a distraction.

It's not, because unmarried long-term cohabitation has exploded.

How long term? As long as a whole childhood?

Unsurprisingly most unmarried parents break up before their kid is an adult.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-gaspard-msw-licsw/livin...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2004878/Unmarried-pa...

Yes. Do you really think most unmarried families have both mother and father in the household, though? Regular contact with the father would be a lot more difficult if he's not around except on weekends.

From the numbers, back in the 50s kids probably only saw their fathers on the weekends in married families. It is startling to see how much more time fathers get with their kids nowdays.

Whilst now we're much more progressive and kids don't see either parent!?

By the numbers, kids see more parents nowadays, though.

No, but I do think an increasing share of full-time two-parent families are unmarried (and married families aren't necessarily living together), and people can get married or begin cohabitation after a child is born, so comparing rates of unwed motherhood is misleading on the magnitude (though consistent with the direction, so far) of any change in the share of children living in single-parent families.

There's no reason for an indirect proxy when the actual figure of interest is available:

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-192...

Sure, the majority still are together, but the gap is widening. Quoting your link:

"During the 1960-2016 period, the percentage of children living with only their mother nearly tripled from 8 to 23 percent and the percentage of children living with only their father increased from 1 to 4 percent."

That means the percentage of families living together is declining.

Thanks for the link BTW. That data is way more relevant than the marriage statistics in this conversation.

> Do you really think most unmarried families have both mother and father in the household, though?

Depends on the country you are in. Here in Norway, quite definitely yes.

About 26% of couples are unmarried now.

Poor working class people?

Absolutely.

It's impossible to get many benefits like WIC, rent assistance, heating assistance, etc if you are married, and it's difficult to afford childcare if mom is working and family cannot chip in, especially when you consider that many industries don't provide full-time jobs or sick time. It's cheaper for mom to stop working due to the child and bridge the gap with public assistance until the kids are around age 3, where there are more/cheaper daycare slots.

My wife worked for a utility with alot of blue collar guys -- easily 30% of the guys there had stay-at-home girlfriends with the kids. Not all of them were on public assistance, but people making $30-40k can't afford infant/toddler daycare.

You hit the bullseye with this one. Parents remain unmarried in a monogamous, cohabiting relationship because the government pays them to not get married. Every benefit that has a household means test attached is an additional incentive to strategically realign the membership of your households.

So you designate one household as the mooch household, and one as the worker household. The latter tends to be ineligible for all manner of otherwise useful benefits, working full-time at minimum wage, and benefits may even be curtailed working part-time. The other can collect the maximum available benefits.

This also leads to some strange behavior in states that have common-law marriages.

> It's impossible to get many benefits like WIC, rent assistance, heating assistance, etc if you are married

Well, more accurately, it's more difficult if you are married to someone who had income because it affects the means test. Of course, for many of those you can't get them unless you identify and secure a child support order against the parent of your children, and then that child support is also treated as income in the means test for the program, so just staying unmarried (with it without cohabiting) doesn't actually solve the problem.

http://www.prb.org/pdf10/single-motherfamilies.pdf

This paper says it's 24%. Do you have a source for 41? That's too high.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/12/18/the-u...

Your statistic is for the fraction of children living in single-mother households. dinoleif's statistic is for the fraction of babies born to single mothers. So your statistic doesn't count babies who are adopted to two-parent households or whose father later marries the mother (probably plus other factors I'm not considering). I'd say your statistic is more directly relevant to "is there a male adult living in the same house", but dinoleif's for "is the child being raised with a legally committed biological father".

There's quite a difference between the 5-41% jump in this first comment, and the 8-23% jump you read in the stats dragonwriter posted.

That was precisely dragonwriter's point in the other thread (I can't nest there any further): your unmarried statistic was not particularly germane.

Further, your comment don't quite make sense in context. OP shows how the statistics in the article shows fathers have become more involved. You say they can't actually be more involved because they're not around?

The article gives statistics broken down by mother/father time as well - there is a substantial increase in both.

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.

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.

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. :(

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.

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.

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.

How old were your kids before they got their smartphones/computers?

in our area, most kids seem to be carrying iPhones by 4th grade. sad, but there it is.

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.

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...

Kids today learn faster than we did also. One they he will fix the breaker box for you and its GG dad.

I truly consider that my kid will be able to use the internet against me in ways inimaginable. Its exciting!

"Man I have no idea where we keep the key for this thing"

"Dont worry dad, I'll know how to pick locks in a sec"

"Oh man who snuck in and welded the thing shut and buried it under 5 feet of concrete? What are the odds?"

I told you, its an exciting time to be a parent.

My parents used to swipe critical computer parts from my machine as punishment, to take it away. Things like power cords, keyboards -- little stuff that cripples the computer. But I had spares for days, stuffed in a little box in the back of my closet :)

Growing up, I didn't need my parents to do that. Getting an IBM PC clone to play the latest games in the 80s required a constant effort of flipping dip switches, pulling jumpers, and reseating chips. Not to mention the whole EMM/EMS thing.

I'm still figuring out what I'm going to do for my son to give him the same... incentives.

One day the kid may outsmart the sly, old fox. Hopefully, today is not that day!

That's awesome! I'm going to use that one

I just shut off the wifi and turn off the data on their phones

Sounds like a problem of the US. It’s not (yet) like that in Europe. We spend a lot of time outside with kids not matter how bad the weather is.

As a European, I disagree. I spent most of my time playing videogames, and my childhood was during the 90s. Maybe because I was city kid.

I spent a lot of my teenage years playing videogames, but I was very rural, maybe theres a sweet village sized spot for it being safe enough to be outside, whilst also having people to be outside with.

I lived in a city (pop. 100k) and most preteens and older walked alone. You don't need a village, just safe roads (single lane, limited speeds) and parks spread throughout the city so that people (young and old) are around.

When was that.

Late 90s/early 2000s. But my younger brother did the same for the past eight years.

Don’t listen to one anecdotal opinion and conclude it’s a US problem. My neighbors kids are outside almost everyday after school and I know of others who have sports practice and other daily activities that aren’t spent inside.

The main difference between US and Europe is the way the cities are setup. Much more walkable and urban centric in EU. Populations are much denser. It was a nice change of pace to be able to walk everywhere last year when I was in Italy.

What happens when you take away the phones as a consequence (other than surly behavior)?

Sign them up for sports! Start with signing them up for everything as the season hits. Try everything once. Let them pick which things they continue with.

Go to the park to practice said sports as a family. Take breaks to play on the play structures. Repeat as needed.

we do, but I am also sick of every requirement to go outside being a scheduled event. there is no spontaneity to their lives, they only go outside when there is a practice or game for one of their sports.

btw their entire middle school is like this. I hope this is not a sad preview of their adult lives...locked in their homes on screens.

I don't have kids, and I'm still pretty young (23), but one of my favorite things to do as a kid was go camping with my family.

Have you thought about a "spontaneous" roadtrip and weekend camping trip somewhere with no reception?

Joining scouts will also make a fair amount of camping happen. Not spontaneously.

What happens if you want to go somewhere cool like a National Park? Do they not want to come along? Is there anything you can trade? Maybe an hour more of game time?

How old are your kids if you don't mind me asking? I'm from Easter-Europe so obviously a much different culture - my child's 3.5 and spends ~4 hours outside every day (except when he's sick or it's really raining outside) and I don't think that's enough to be honest - that's still 20h/day from his childhood spent trapped between 4 walls :(

early teens. they should be outside.

Teenagers don't really play outside.

I was outside all the time before age 13 - after that I started going to the mall and talking on the phone and working on the computer in lieu of outdoor activities.

This was back in the early 90s. No need to panic.

Don't you have an equivalent to football (soccer) wherever you are?

I've heard many parents of teenagers complaining that it's hard to get them off their football matches (5-a-side soccer is huge here, and any street can become an impromptu pitch).

Of course, depends on the kid, you couldn't take me off books and computers (when available) as a teenager.

One of the things our kids did was Riekes Nature Studies[1] which gave them one day a week where they spent in a variety of activities with other kids in a large park nearby (Huddart Park in Woodside). This became one of their favorite things to do because not only were many friends present, the facilitators were excellent at engaging the interests in a wide variety of kids. I remember "forcing" my youngest daughter to go and once she went she couldn't stop talking about how great it was and developed many friends that persist to today.

As a parent I came to realize that kids are unlikely to try new things spontaneously if they already have an activity they could be doing which meets their expectations of interest. So as a parent it was incumbent on me to give them the exposure to new experiences in order for them to develop their own understanding of what they did and didn't like.

[1] http://www.riekes.org/nature/

I sometimes ssh in and turn off the computer if my wife has told the kids to turn it off already. But seriously, you're the adult, turn it off and take them outside.

Did you put effort into raising them to behave differently?

Why did you give them continuous phone and steam access?

Because otherwise they will be loners. All of their friends are online. If you are offline, you are alone. I don't like this but in 2017 it is the reality for teens.

The question was why do you give them continuous phone and steam access? - continuous being the key word here. Limiting their device usage to a few hours a day does not make them socal outcasts.

Ah, even that's a phase. Wait 'til they get a girlfriend/boyfriend and a taste of freedom. Suddenly it's all bus passes and coffee shops and wandering around downtown in every weather. Can't get them home.

(But when they are home, yeah, it's text text text.)

Why do you feel that it's so important that kids get "fresh air?" My parents relentlessly tried to get me to get off the computer and go outside. I hated it, and in retrospect I can't see how it did me any good.

Limit their access to these devices. After a pre set amount of time you take away their devices or data and they have to figure something else to do.

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.

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.

Can you cite some cases of that happening, preferably a pattern of said cases?

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.

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.

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 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 :)

You don't need to spend time with someone to micromanage them.

Then micromanaging is not related to the OP research about spending time with them.

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.

What age was the child?

Maybe 2nd or 3rd grade. Playing in the front yard with parents watching from the house.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com