[lp4vn]

I arrived to the conclusion that this "risk-aversion" in child rearing is basically the result of smaller families. This may sound callous but I think parents are much more OK with their oldest son/dqughter taking bigger risks if there are other 4 ones at home than if that's your only child and losing him/her is the end of your lineage. Not saying that more kids work as a genetic backup, but I think that for sure that creates a subconscious effect in the parents' risk assessment.

I read somewhere that propensity to war is proportional to the average age of a society. I think the same phenomenon applies to acceptance of risk in child behaviour but now related to fertility rate.

[aylmao]

Adding two notes onto this hypothesis:

- I can only assume that if a kid doesn't have an older sibling "to keep an eye on them" the parents take this role, and parents tend to be more risk-adverse and responsible caretakers than siblings.

- I've never lived in the American suburbs, but they don't seem very dense. I know that, growing up in Mexico, the kid density was great. Some of it probably has to do with the fact everyone had siblings. Matching ages with nearby neighbors is more likely when there's more kids too. We were outside all the time, older siblings introduced younger ones to the crowd. Friendships were made, broken and fixed. Adventures were had. More than once we got into situations that I knew my mom wouldn't be happy about too.

[lapcat]

> I can only assume that if a kid doesn't have an older sibling "to keep an eye on them" the parents take this role, and parents tend to be more risk-adverse and responsible caretakers than siblings.

This hypothesis doesn't make sense, because all children were treated differently many decades ago, and by pure math the most common type of child is the first born. Every family no matter the size has a firstborn child, who by definition has no older sibling to keep an eye on them. The fact is that parents were just less hovering helicopters in the past. I can attest to this as firstborn myself.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

> by pure math the most common type of child is the first born.

I understand the sentiment you're trying to convey but I have to point out that's only true if the average family size is less than 2. The second it hits a full 3 that's very obviously untrue and most cultures in the past definitely had averages above 3.

[lapcat]

> that's very obviously untrue

Only under a very uncharitable misunderstanding of what I said. If the categories are simply "first born" and "not first born", then first born ceases to be the most common as family size increases. But if the categories are "first born", "second born", "third born", etc., then first born never ceases to be the most common. And as I said, "Every family no matter the size has a firstborn child, who by definition has no older sibling to keep an eye on them", so it hasn't been explained why parents were less risk-adverse in the past toward firstborn children (who have no older silbings to keep an eye on them). Every parent past and present had to deal with a firstborn.

[peteradio]

Yours is the uncharitable understanding. The premise is "watched by adults" vs "watched by sibling". If family size is 3 then you have 1 who was watched by adults and 2 who were watched by a sibling.

[bombcar]

And as family sizes increase, the family increases as well, so even the first born may not be treated as such, because they were always watched by cousins. Very quickly you can have a completely extant sub-culture in the children that is unaffected much by the adults.

[lapcat]

My comments were talking about firstborn children. They literally have zero siblings.

[imp0cat]

There is a wonderful Bluey episode about this - Fairytale - where the dad tells a real life fairytale about living in the 80's.

[Yhippa]

To your second point: I grew up in the American suburbs and had that. Probably not to the degree you did. I've noticed in the suburbs today that there are such few kids and it's just really quiet all the time. It's really sad to walk around the neighborhood or be outside and you don't hear kids playing.

People also seem to have fewer kids if they have them. That implies fewer cousin interactions like I had and also all those things you mentioned never happen. It's unbelievably sad.

[bluGill]

You are missing something: 200 years ago you were lucky if 1 in 5 kids lived to 5 years old - disease was a big killer. As such you dare not get attached to your kids if you do you will be heart broke when they die. So you let the kids do whatever, the ones that survive great, the ones that don't well odds are it wasn't the risk taking that got them anyway. (you also had to work hard to find enough food for this family)

Don't read the above as kids were allowed to do anything. They were cared for, but it wasn't as close as modern families would care for them. If the kid is mostly safe that is good enough.

[bombcar]

I don't think mortality was 80% by 5 years, even 200 years ago.

But if you have ten kids, you won't be able to pay as much attention to each one as if you only had one, so even if you're perfect you'll have the kids doing more things without the parents knowing.

[waveBidder]

https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-big-problem-in-br... In the mid 1800's Germany it was ~50%, so every other. not as dire as gp, but definitely enough to change relationships.

[bombcar]

I'd be interested to see it broken down between literal infant mortality (those children who didn't survive birth, basically) and the rest.

From there, it seems the single biggest remaining factor is malaria.

(50% feels about right given reading accounts of "back then" and browsing graveyards)

[strken]

Perhaps it's the result of small families for completely different reasons than you posit.

On the first child, parents are still learning. They're risk conscious and worry about everything. On the second child, they've picked up a few specific fears ("What if Alice gets hit in the head while horse-riding like Bob did?") and stopped stressing about the others. On children three and four they've got much more experience and just don't worry about things as much.

With larger families, this attitude would come to be reflected by society as a whole. With smaller families, parents don't make it past the first and second child so often, and they never stop worrying.

[lapcat]

> On the first child, parents are still learning. They're risk conscious and worry about everything.

There's no actual empirical evidence for this pop psychological theory, and it's certainly not my experience as a firstborn way back in the day. Moreover, we're not talking about babies, who of course need to be coddled. The issue is with kids who are old enough for unsupervised play, by which time the parents are already experienced, literally 10+ years of parenting experience, and if they have two kids, they've likely had both before one of them is old enough for unsupervised play, at most maybe five years apart.

In fact, parents are more likely to forget than they are to learn. It's not like they've never encountered kids before in their lives. They were kids themselves! They just need to remember what it was like for them as kids. The hardest part is taking care of infants, because you generally don't remember what it was like to be an infant, so infants are somewhat more mysterious than older kids.

[circlefavshape]

It totally was my experience of being a firstborn. My mother went through a stage of insisting I stay in my own garden, which meant I missed out on lots of stuff the other kids were doing. My younger brothers roamed all over the fields that surrounded us (though having said that they were much less likely to do what they were told than I was)

[lapcat]

Garden?

Anyway, I'm not denying your specific experience. It all depends on the time and the place and the parents, and those can all be different. I'm not even denying that firstborns may be treated a little differently than later children. What I am denying is that firstborn risk consciousness can explain a major societal shift in childrearing attitudes. In general, firstborn children 50 years ago were given much more personal freedom than even later children today, despite the fact that "GenX" was a smaller generation in population with few siblings.

[bombcar]

Garden is a European term used sometimes for "yard" - so mom didn't let him leave the yard, but the younger brothers were allowed to.

We have the English world kindergarten from this.

[strken]

What do you mean there's no evidence? Consider e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1995.76.1.4...:

> children's birth order and family size are consistently related to styles of parenting (i.e., levels of control and levels of warmth) which are known to influence achievement directly (Baumrind, 1767, 1971; Dornbusch, et al., 1987; Paulson, 1994; Steinberg, et al., 1789). For example, firstborn children have rated parents higher on behaviors such as parental control (Schaller, 1978) and parental strictness (Rule, 1991) than later-born children

The pop-science explanation may or may not be true, but the underlying fact that later children get a different parenting style has supporting evidence.

[geraldhh]

as @lapcat noted, there is a paywal preventing access to the information you refer to. this is somewhat subpar, pls link open information, quote or idk something

https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1995.76.1.43

[strken]

I wasn't going to link directly to a pirate site, even if it's convenient and even though journals are parasites.

[lapcat]

The full article is behind a paywall, but the abstract doesn't seem to say what you're saying. It does say:

1) Kids and parents have differing perceptions of the parenting style: "Birth-order and family-size differences were found in adolescents' achievement and perceptions of parenting style and parental involvement but not in parents' perceptions of parenting." Thus, your statement "the underlying fact that later children get a different parenting style" doesn't actually seem to be a fact.

2) Parenting style, whether it actually differed or not among children, didn't seem to explain the differences in archievement: "these parenting characteristics did not mediate the differences seen in achievement by birth order and family size."

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

why would you characterize that as pop psychology?

[lapcat]

Because it's a theory that sounds superficially plausible to laypeople when presented and not given much thought or scrutiny, but there's no actual scientific basis or empirical support for the idea.

[331c8c71]

I don't think this is the case. Where I am from the number of children is quite the same now compared to when I was kid. Yet the activities that were absolutely normal for the kids back in the day would be a definite deviation from the norm now - all in line with increased "risk aversion".

[lapcat]

> I arrived to the conclusion that this "risk-aversion" in child rearing is basically the result of smaller families.

This seems unlikely. I had only one sibling, but way back when I was young we were given free rein. And we were latchkey kids, because both parents were working. The only rule was that you had to be home in time for dinner, but otherwise we were completely unsupervised after school and could roam anywhere our feet or bicycles could take us. Everyone was like this at the time, all of the kids, regardless of family size. My next door neighbor and good friend was an only child. IIRC most of my friends had one sibling at most.

I think what's changed is the media fearmongering about the dangers to kids. Crap like America's Most Wanted freaked out parents, massively damaging our collective psyche. Also, the rise of the internet has given ultra-judgmental cranks a platform to spread their opinions about child rearing and tut-tut any parent who isn't a helicopter. Indeed, ultra-judgmental internet cranks have practically taken over every aspect of society now.

[pr0crastin8]

You and GP can both be correct.

Even if your smaller family and others like it had a more relaxed approach to parenting, no doubt that was in part due to the culture of the time where people generally had larger families.

The collective media fearmongering that is persistent nowadays is only popular because most people accept the narrative. This could easily be because today they generally have one or two children whereas when you grew up that was not the norm and such ideas would not have been popular.

[lapcat]

> Even if your smaller family and others like it had a more relaxed approach to parenting, no doubt that was in part due to the culture of the time where people generally had larger families.

Nope. If you think about it, GenX was the smallest of the recent generations, despite Boomers being a large generation (hence their name), so family sizes had already shrunk dramatically before the more recent phenomenon of helicopter parenting. "Gen Xers were sometimes called the "latchkey generation", which stems from their returning as children from school to an empty home and needing to use a key to let themselves in. This was a result of what is now called free-range parenting, plus increasing divorce rates, and increased maternal participation in the workforce prior to widespread availability of childcare options outside the home." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X

As far as I remember, almost all of my peers had only one sibling at most. Families of two children or even one child were extremely common at the time.

By the way, the reason that people had larger families in the past wasn't because kids died and needed to be replaced. It was because they didn't have birth control.

[331c8c71]

I don't think this is the case. Where I am from the number of children is quite the same now compared to when I was kid. Yet the activities that were absolutely normal for the kids back in the day would be a definite deviation from norm now - all in line with increased "risk aversion".

[xandrius]

It's not really about smaller families, it's about children density, living in a safe area (no cars counts as well) and the mentality (sometimes that translates into local laws).

Once you fix that, kids are going to be kids.

[globular-toast]

You might be on to something, but in my experience it's the opposite: parents are overly concerned with their first child then relax a lot by 3 or 4 at which point they barely give a shit, relatively.

[bombcar]

There's also the simple limitation that if you have one kid, you can watch that kid like a hawk; if you have four, good luck once they realize they can go in four directions, and you can only go in one.

The solution, of course, is technology and drones ;)

[anon291]

> This may sound callous but I think parents are much more OK with their oldest son/dqughter taking bigger risks if there are other 4 ones at home than if that's your only child and losing him/her is the end of your lineage. Not saying that more kids work as a genetic backup, but I think that for sure that creates a subconscious effect in the parents' risk assessment.

Well, actually you're not totally off. Having more kids (we have three, more on the way hopefully) definitely lowers the pressure on individual ones. But moreover, and more importantly, seeing our friends with large families (5+), the biggest reason the kids can play is that the older siblings are there. When we get together with a few other families of that size, the oldest kids are like 8 - 10 (i.e., old enough to let us know if the littles are in serious trouble). It's really easy to let your kids go play in the woods by themselves if you trust the older ones to run and tell you if something is wrong. Bonus points for having multiple families with the same arrangement so one can tell you something is wrong while the group is still 'supervised'.

My eldest girl (one of the youngest in the group) is convinced that the older kids are still 'kids', but she also naturally listens to them despite having a dominant personality herself. Thus, she gets to have fun with them, while we are happy the kids have some sense in the group.

So from my perspective I think the following is true:

1. Most people have one or two kids. This makes the child density very low. Parents today have to actually work to get their kids around other kids.

2. The way cities are set up makes it hard for kids to interact. While we live in a walkable neighborhood and some of our friends with large families do too, they're unfortunately not well connected except by car, so my wife or I have to make an effort to see them. Luckily, we're good friends with the parents, but otherwise this would make it difficult.

3. Schooling artificially limits the age range kids are exposed to. Obviously, you only get kids your age in your class, but because of (1), even if you got to know their siblings, you still only get one more age, and siblings are likely to not be super far apart.

4. Yes, parents certainly feel more trepidation when they've invested everything into one kid, versus investing everything into multiple kids. I don't see how anyone can honestly doubt this. I don't even think it's callous. Just reality.

I mean, I saw it with my grandparents, who had more kids than my parents did. They were easily taken care of in their old age by the multiple children they had, whereas by choosing a smaller family (not totally their choice), my parents put a much greater burden on my brother and I (mostly me, since I live closer). That's just the truth of the thing.