Post-Peak Parenting

[l33tminion]

In the past few years, I've read a few books that discuss modern American middle-class parenting:

Leanore Skenazy's Free Range Kids suggests that middle-class American parents are going crazy with worry in a media environment that exaggerates the risks posed to children by crime or accident. (The sole risk that gets understated is the danger of

Comments

[gwendally]

Some of this is also related to the exodus from the family farm. We've become a nation of homeless people in the sense that Robert Frost meant when he said "home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." He referred to a family farm that could integrate the labor of another adult and be able to feed them.

Farm children grew up with a necessary independence and workload, but also with an intergenerational support system watching over them.

I was born into a midwest family with a twenty acre farm in the 1960s. My grandmother and uncles lived within biking distance on country roads.

My children, born in the 1990s, lived in a small town and we could still bike and walk everywhere, but we had no family nearby to be casual help in raising them. As such, I needed to hire people and put parameters around what was "good enough" for hired help to do that was more than I'd have required from family members.

[l33tminion]

That puts all those news stories about "millenials living with their parents" in a different light. Those tend to have lots of concern that more education / later marriage / fewer jobs will delay kids getting "out of the basement" and into their own house (or maybe (preferably?) another city), with the implication that staying with their folks is an economic drain on the older generation. But I don't remember any media commentary on that trend that connects it to the decline in family businesses (or family farms specifically).