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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think part of the problem is that as we become more economically stable, there is the expectation that you will hire help instead of rely on friends and neighbors. Some people are lucky that they have supportive families (good for you for helping out your sister), some of us are not so lucky. But beyond family, it would seem odd these days to just ask a neighbor or even a good friend to randomly babysit for free. In the old days, kids could just play together in the neighborhood, and whichever parent was around would take them in and not think too much of it. People helped each other out more. [/quote]
I don't think it's only the expectation of hiring help, I think it's also that "whichever parent was around" started to be only 1 or 2 parents and it got old that no one else was willing to step in. [/quote]

Yes. And before people yell at what I'm about to say, I am NOT saying the solution is for women to stay home.

But back when women staying home or just working part time and just being more present in the home was the default, it did solve a ton of the problems of modern parenting by just having a lot of adults at home all the time. Kids could be supervised more easily plus you were more likely to know your neighbors and trust them, so the idea of your kid playing down the street was less stressful because you know the people who lived there and that they'd contact you if need be. Kids could be more free because there were adults in the vicinity, so they spent more time outside and figuring stuff out on their own, which lessened the overall burden of parenting once a child was about 6 years old. There was more a sense of raising kids in a community even if you weren't super intentional about creating a community, because anywhere you'd find families, you'd find SAHMs and adults around during the day. You would also often find grandparents, especially grandmothers, who viewed it as part of their societal role to keep an eye on neighborhood kids and participate in creating a safe place for kids. I had a childless neighbor who lived across the street when I was a kid and even she participated in the general supervision of neighborhood kids -- we knew here and she knew us and she knew our parents.

When everyone (or almost everyone) has a dual income family, there aren't adults around and it doesn't just mean there's no neighbor to watch your kids for free. It means there's no neighbor at all, so you don't even want your kid playing down the street at all because who know who is down there. So now we have all this stress around the idea of kids being in danger and needing supervision, because there's no kind of incidental community supervision. This is not only more expensive (nannies, sisters, day camps, aftercare, after school activities), it's also more stressful because you are always trying to patch together "coverage" of your kids. I have upper elementary age kids and there is this whole thing around letting them walk to and from school alone, and where you might feel comfortable with them going without you. When I was a kid, the answer would be "anywhere in the broader neighborhood but not crossing the major commercial streets bordering the neighborhood." Which was still a huge area that encompassed many streets and parks, a creek we used to hike down to, and some trails that connected some of the houses from behind. Meanwhile, I know parents in our neighborhood who do not let a child go anywhere without adult supervision until 12 or 13. Anywhere. If they can't see their kids entire route from their house to a neighbor's house, they will walk them, even if the kid is 10 years old and perfectly capable of doing that themselves, and the house is around the corner. With watches and phones and AirTags parents can also digitally monitor their kids everywhere, and a lot of parents feel they have to because there is just no sense of trust in community, and with good reason. A lot of your neighbors, even neighbors who are also parents who also have kids, will simply view your kids as 100% your responsibility and not feel they have any role in communal supervision of children. It's incredibly burdensome.

Again, I don't think the solution here is for women to all stay home -- it was economically unjust to put this on women (especially while also paying them less, controlling what they did with their own bodies, and failing to protect them from violence and harassment). Now that WFH is more of a thing, maybe we don't even need people to stop working. But there's this cultural shift that has occurred in the time between when I was a child and now having kids, and I think parenting is going to be a harder endeavor until we fix it. Expecting two people to be 100% responsible for the physical safety of their kids from birth until they are teenagers is a very heavy responsibility (and an expensive one if you outsource some of that responsibility, which most of us do) and just really not something humans have ever done before. It also probably has negative impacts on kids because they don't get enough freedom and spend way more time either with their parents directly (it's just healthy to get a break from that relationship, for both parties) or in organized activities their parents pay for to keep them supervised and occupied while at work. It actually sucks for both working parents and SAHPs because neither has the benefit of communal care for kids and they both wind up doing more than parents did 30 or 40 years ago in terms of watching and occupying their kids. And non-parents view themselves as totally outside the project of raising kids, it's someone else's issue, it's an imposition they find offensive to accept (in contrast to, for instance, my old neighbor or many of the retired ladies in my neighborhood who thought nothing of looking out a window and noticing a kid had fallen down and coming out to help or going to find that kid's mom). It's a broken system and birth rates will keep declining if we don't change it.[/quote]

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