Hacker News Reader

Hah, you're welcome. This is really interesting because it raises the question: what role does affluence have to play in all of this?

In the case of my country, people usually aren't rich enough to save for retirement, nor are starting salaries high enough for young adults to stake out on their own. So parents help their kids right up to the point they can no longer work, and then kids take over to provide for the family.

In case of you being affluent (as in with a completely well-funded retirement), I can totally see why you'd want your kids to not see your wealth as theirs. It might ruin their incentives to be productive citizens.

So, does affluence naturally lead to a weakening of strong family ties? Dunno.

I think we need to have a better idea what's meant by "family ties". I'm from the US. My teammate on a project is a woman from India. (We're both working in the US.) She doesn't have children, but I have a 9yo daughter. We talk about differences in how my wife and I raise our daughter versus how she was raised. My wife and I follow the trend in the US of being very involved in our daughter's life. We walk her to school, volunteer for her softball and basketball leagues, and play key roles in the PTA. I stepped back my software engineering career so that I can pick her up a few days a week from school and either hang out, setup a play date, or bring her to an activity. (As an aside, because I'm part-time employed now, I assumed more of the household tasks. There seems to be a trend in this direction in the US for men.)

In my teammate's experience, parents in India tend to be more hands off and let their kids develop independence earlier. Parents focus more on career. Grandparents are more involved with caring for the children while parents work. Despite the more hands off approach, my teammate misses her parents greatly and was very sad and worried when her father was ill recently.

The parenting approaches are different, but the ephemeral "family tie" seems to be present in both situations.

Articles like this make me think the Indian way is better:

http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/children-today-are-suffering...

I'm about to have a kid (wife is 8 months pregnant) so I've been thinking about this some. Unfortunately though, a lot of this is culture and individual parents can't necessarily do a lot. It doesn't matter if I'd rather my kid play in a pick-up game instead of an organized league if all the other kids in the neighborhood are only in leagues.

That is an interesting article but I don't think they do it any better in India. In India there is even more emphasis on memorizing things. In India academics are probably over emphasized.

shrug

I really have no idea. Was just responding to the parent comment which said: "In my teammate's experience, parents in India tend to be more hands off and let their kids develop independence earlier."

I have Indian from the US but have spent time in India. I think its the opposite, but as you said shrug

Just some advice, don't worry about organized league vs. street play so much. I played organized hockey year-round (up to 3 teams at a time) and still had plenty of time for unorganized play with neighborhood kids. I grew up in an urban, relatively population-dense neighborhood. Within 2 blocks, there were at least 30 kids within 3 years of my age. Your child's chance to do unorganized activity depends mostly on the number of kids close to his/her age within shouting distance.

The biggest drain on your child's free time is going to be school. Our culture is scared right now about falling behind the rest of the developed world in cognitive skills necessary for the future job market. The knee-jerk reaction is to work harder. The result is that more homework gets assigned, more testing takes place, and some groups are calling for longer school days and less vacation time.

You're a parent now. Educate yourself on child development and Education reform. Then get yourself involved politically so you can be your child's advocate.

Actually, my experience (Indian-American, brought up in the States but currently studying in India), is sort of the opposite.

Americans inculcate a _lot_ more independence than Indians do.

For example, in the US:

- Kids often get jobs and earn their own pocket money at 13+. It's the norm in most places after 16.

- Kids fund their own education

- After 18, there's an expectation in many families that the child will leave and become independent (or at least start paying rent)

- Kids generally make their own life decisions

- This reverses in old age; "old people's homes" are common in the US. After retirement, parents stay separate, and if they're unable to take care of themselves will often move into one of these. Nuclear families are common

In India:

- Middle class kids will not earn until 18, mostly not until after college. When they do earn it's something you can brag about. Definitely not the norm.

- Education is funded by parents. I earned a lot of money last year (I'm a college student). When my friends asked me what I intended to do with it, I got quizzical looks when I said that I was repaying my education. (Higher ed isn't particularly expensive here, but it's not cheap either, and I sort of wanted to start being more independent)

- It is perfectly fine to stay home till ... forever.

- Life decisions are made by the family, sometimes. Marriage is an example of this (though arguably there's a lot of legacy cultural reasons behind that). But career choices are too. A ton of the folks in my college are there because their family wanted them to study engineering.

- Kids take care of their parents as they get older. Extended families are common.

YMMV, of course, but this is commonly how things go from talking with my peers in both countries. Perhaps what you're noticing is a difference in generations, not in countries. Parents are universally more involved in the minutae of their children's lives than they used to be in the past.

> So, does affluence naturally lead to a weakening of strong family ties?

IMO, what you call strong family ties, others might call patriarchy. When women have improved ability to support themselves, they're more inclined to leave abusive relationships. And like Sandberg, they're less willing to accept menial household roles traditionally assigned to them. There's a podcast from Planet Money about how this plays out among textile workers, if I recall correctly.

> IMO, what you call strong family ties, others might call patriarchy.

They are often correlated and found in similar cultural sources, but they are distinct elements. The US idealization of the nuclear rather than extended family and corresponding weaker family ties didn't (and still often doesn't) come with the breaking of patriarchy -- in fact, it is rooted in a time when patriarchy was quite strong -- though you sometimes (especially now) find non-patriarchal arrangements along with it.

Strong family ties and non-transactional view of family interactions doesn't have any essential tie to patriarchy, nor do weak family ties and a transaction approach to interactions have any essential tie to the absence of patriarchy.

These views both have value, and both can be overplayed.

Hopefully you can also instill in your children an understanding that there is always some luck involved also, and help them avoid that pernicious failure to understand that because someone is not successful does not mean you can conclude they just have not worked hard enough.

> This is very interesting, and brings to mind something I've been struggling with recently (I'm USA-ian by the way). As a father I want to instill in my children a sense of self reliance, a sense that they can go into the world and make their own way, and be successful, without my help. In my world view, that is the best gift I can give them.

Me too. I have spent more than 1/2 my life in the US, though I have one Indian parent and one parent from a culture where families have, for lack of a better term, "collective success" (as you put it well, "my wealth as their wealth, or my success as their success.")

But I moved out at 16 and feel that my life now, decades later, is the life _I_ made. And my son is perfectly happy knowing that he won't inherit a penny (I find even the concept of "estate planning" grotesque and anti-republican).

None of this should imply I am any sort of Randian libertarian. I was incredibly lucky to be born in a wealthy country not at war, to have been able to go through a excellent school systems, and to have had a stable family and to have spent most of my working life in western democracies. It certainly has bred an orientation to be of benefit to society and to support my own child to be self reliant and also to be, I hope, a net contributor to society as well.

But the atavistic desire to emphasize obligations within a family is to me a sign of a weakness in a society.

> I don't want my children to see my wealth as their wealth, or my success as their success

I think that's a good view. I had Chinese immigrant parents who did pretty well financially. They used money as a means of control: they gave me an extremely meager allowance but said if I ever wanted something, I should just ask. Meaning I could have it only if they also approved of it. This resulted in me getting jobs as soon as possible.

So, from that angle, I don't want my children to see my wealth as their wealth, or my success as their success. I would like them to view my success as the result of hard work and perseverance, and an example of what they can achieve, indeed, they can achieve more.

I advise to look out for the opposite perspective or angle to this that it might be viewed as a form of abuse, unnecessary harshness or worse meagerness.

Teaching your kids survival skills esp. males and how to be strong in life is very crucial and "tough love" can sometimes yield good results but you don't wanna to break the bond or the good relationship you have between you and your kids in the process.

It is all about their wellbeing and fostering and nurturing this relationship after all, isn't it or am I mistaken?

I think there is a clear balance that can be struck with saying "This is what I have created and I share it with you out of love" and "What I created is yours by virtue of being my child". I think the results he seeks can be achieved without wandering into "tough love" realms. In fact, I assume he means it more in that sense.

My children have thanked me for giving them that strength and individualism. For allowing them to not having it all handed to them. I practiced similar to the parent and my relationship with my children is rock solid.

I think there is a fine line between the two. When you look at upper-class society, you realize that giving your child everything can cause them to become spoiled without any perspective of the value of a dollar. If the money should dry up, they'll likely hit the ground hard. On the other end of the spectrum, you start to tip-toe into the, "I had to work 12 hour days. Why can't you do it?" territory.

The balance comes when showing them that food doesn't magically appear on the table while still acknowledging that life can still kick you in the rear in spite of you doing everything right. It's telling them that it's time for them to make their own way, but it's also putting out the crash mat when they're free falling.