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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Yet there was also much more time in general to be devoted to childrearing, since there were clearly more children back then.

You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. US Census has been running time use surveys for many decades now, which give us good data on what people actually spend their time on.

The trend is obvious: people spend much more time on active childcare today than they used to. Today, a mother working full time spends about as much time on childcare as stay at home moms used to 50 years ago. Hard to believe it, but it’s true.

In my personal experience, time spent on childcare doesn’t scale linearly with number of kids, and indeed plateaus pretty quickly. For example, when I visit my friends who also have kids of age similar to hours, I basically don’t need to do any child caring at all, they just play together and don’t need anything from me aside from occasional conflict resolution. This is a huge glaring contrast compared to times when we only had one, and it demanded constant attention, because it simply did not want to be left to play alone. As you get to 4-5+ kids, I imagine the older ones can be very helpful in caring for younger ones.

For example, when I visit my friends who also have kids of age similar to hours, I basically don’t need to do any child caring at all, they just play together and don’t need anything from me aside from occasional conflict resolution. This is a huge glaring contrast compared to times when we only had one, and it demanded constant attention, because it simply did not want to be left to play alone. As you get to 4-5+ kids, I imagine the older ones can be very helpful in caring for younger ones.

Thanks for pointing that out. It's a rather relevant issue in this context. I'd only add from experience that this, however, doesn't fully work when 3 or 5 children are together, as one will get ostracized or neglected by the others.

Exactly. There's pretty huge economies of scale in managing young children, whether it's between siblings, cousins or general neighborhood factors. Families drifting apart from each other, and the reproductive rate dropping as a whole, have essentially killed a lot of the positive feedback loops

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