[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.