[llm_trw]

Your parents by definition will only be able to spend 20% of the time on you that they could on a single child if they didn't neglect the others.

Seeing children with multiple siblings with less than 8 year difference between them vs single children is shocking just how differently kids are treated.

This is the most accurate but least factual description of what it looks like from the outside when a family keeps adding kids as fast as they can https://malcolminthemiddle.fandom.com/wiki/Flashback

[llm_nerd]

I would argue that your position is the "perfectionist parenting" nonsense that many have used to avoid having children.

Do you think all of the latchkey lone children of the current generation are the most psychologically healthy individuals the world has seen? Do you think they're the most loved or coddled? The most educated? Your anecdote is actually kind of hilarious in context.

The idea that 2 children splits the love or attention is absolutely insane.

[llm_trw]

>Do you think all of the latchkey lone children of the current generation are the most psychologically healthy individuals the world has seen?

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/siblings.html

80% of kids under 18 have siblings in the USA today.

>The idea that 2 children splits the love is absolutely insane.

It's also what's blindingly obvious when you spend more than 5 minutes in a playground with single kids and multiple kids.

[llm_nerd]

>80% of kids under 18 have siblings in the USA today.

I wasn't claiming that all or most kids are single children. I was observing that by your philosophy those single children would somehow have the best outcomes (in a multivariate manner). I don't think that's the case.

>It's also what's blindingly obvious

Sure.

[DAGdug]

It’s the same logic as: when I married, the time to cook each meal doubled. Ugh, no - many things scale vastly sublinearly with the number of kids one has.

[beachtaxidriver]

I see your point. But I think you may be taking it to extremes.

A parent can snuggle multiple kids at once, read to multiple kids at once, take multiple kids to the zoo at once, etc.

Moreover siblings have their own rich relationships.

Having closely spaced siblings is pretty normal.

[llm_trw]

In the west in the year of our lord 1955.

And in the year of our lord 2025 it's normal not to have kids in the west.

In most of the rest of the world neither of those things were normal.

Which is the point.

The west is weird when it comes to raising children and has been uniquely bad at it for over 80 years which happens to be living memory for pretty much everyone on here.

[navane]

Having closed spaced siblings was normal in the entire world forever until a couple decades ago. There wasn't even birth control.

[WalterBright]

80 years? Things started to go awry around 1970. That's when the Boy Scouts stopped treating scouts like young adults and instead began treating them like delicate flowers.

You can see the change in the Boy Scout manual.

[llm_trw]

The great depression destroyed the social fabric of the us more thoroughly than did the civil war. The 1950s weren't normal, they were the result of a generations want for stability and domesticity when they had no idea what either looked like. For one thing the end of generational households to be replaced by nuclear family households was seen by the people at the time as worse than single parent households are today and with good reason.

That the majority of conservatives today pine for the 50s us that we not only lost the ability to have a stable society but even the memory of what one should look like.

[WalterBright]

> Your parents by definition will only be able to spend 20% of the time on you that they could on a single child if they didn't neglect the others.

Parents can spend time with their children as a group. Parents with lots of kids have the kids do the chores.

[anon291]

Yes the single child is usually unsociable and verging on narcissistic.

Your issue here is that you have labeled the single kids life as good and the multi sibling family as bad .

It used to be the opposite. People would pity a single child.