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Comment by avip | Hacker News Reader

This is indeed pretty depressing.

The ongoing disintegration of the normative human society, loss of extended family structures, and escalating segmentation of what used to be a community to different age and class groups well separated in spacetime is a world-wide disaster with far-reaching ripples.

One of the obvious consequences is for-profit organizations entering the vacuum left by communities. Of course Elizabeth et. al. are not to blame, they cannot fix reality and nor can I.

And yet... this is just depressing.

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(I'm Tom, Elizabeth's cofounder) - I agree with the societal reflection. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam really speaks to this so well.

While one of the changes we think about is that, the more positive one is that we now know SO much about how the young brain develops. We want parents to have access to that in a meaningful way. I often use the healthcare analogy; when someone wants support with their health (whether proactive wellness or reactive treatment) they'll often go to a doctor which is great (and why it's so bad when people don't have healthcare). Raising a child is of course different in many ways, but the internet is awash with generic, impersonal advice whereas we hope to bring back the human connection. We're excited to be able to bring this growing field of expertize to parents in a way that is deeply human at it's heart.

But yes... changes in communities are still depressing.

just to make the obvious explicit - I wish your product and yourself success and by no means suggest you're doing anything wrong or not well-intended.

btw, normative countries provide plenty of help and support, for free, to young first-time parents. This is probably the best investment a society could do, even in terms of purely financial ROI!

Didn't take it that way but thank you for saying that :)

And agree! The organization Zero to Three does a great job advocating for this in the US but we're still way behind.

It's not very long term, but kraamverzorgsters in the Netherlands are a great example!

>The ongoing disintegration of the normative human society, loss of extended family structures, and escalating segmentation of what used to be a community to different age and class groups well separated in spacetime is a world-wide disaster with far-reaching ripples.

My theory is that this is the true price of obtaining financial freedom, and hence actual freedom. Community requires compromise (sometimes unfairly more from some than others). But once the glue of economic dependence on one another is removed, what is the force that would make people compromise? Everyone can do their own thing, which is nice, but seems to have some pretty big unforeseen large scale downsides that are slowly revealing themselves.

Yes, my reaction was pretty much 'Ugh, they'll probably be very successful and make a tonne of money from the 'there's an app for that' generation, but ugh.'

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