I think this really undersells it. My mom parented a few hours a week. My kids (like most) lived under ceaseless 24/7 adulting. The time I spent with my sons was more like a 20x increase over my parents' generation.

Past that, it seems like it's taking forever for anyone to notice the radical changes in modern parenting/childhood. Along with eliminating adult-free peer time, we've eradicated free range areas. My generation could roam (w/o adults) for miles in every direction; my kids (like most) could go from one edge of the yard to the other (credit: car culture, trespassing culture, false stranger-danger culture).

The surprising part (to me) isn't how thoroughly adults have sabotaged kids growth opportunities, it's that nearly no one seems to have noticed it.

Bad parenting tends to be more of the type that isn’t engaged. Kids don’t hate you for going to work. They are hurt if you come home and ignore them.

Woke up at 6am. Child 1 woke up at 7am. Dropped her off at daycare at 8am. All the other children were being dropped off by their dads, too. Full day of work ahead. Dinner at 6pm. Bath at 7pm. Bedtime and story at 8pm. Usually calls with Bangalore from 9pm to midnight but it's Labour Day over there. Sleep at midnight.

Rinse. Repeat.

To be clear, I'm not trying to point a causal arrow here, or even say it's good or bad. I read a study the other day that asserted that fathers who spent more time parenting have measurably lower testosterone levels, and that the delta correlates to the amount of time spent.

Every dad wants his sons to be a better father than he was. Glad to see it happening.

Nothing strengthens the knees like the weight of responsibility.

Can a good part of the mental load be attributed to the need for the parents to ‘do it all’ themselves rather than share the load and responsibility with other loved ones and caregivers without the need to tightly control all aspects of parenting?

On a separate note - Insta is constantly feeding my wife with versions of parenting which is completely unattainable. That really is at the heart of the mental load we are experiencing in our situation of raising two under five. If only Insta was banned, life would have been far more better for parents.

I think it's unquestionably true that fathers spending more time with their children is, on the whole, much better for those children.

But it's also true that it's a huge problem for society that people are having fewer children. And I think you can make a reasonable argument that increasing expectations around the quality of parenting are party of that trend.

The real benefiter of this is the capitalist who can now have twice the workforce at the price of one.

How about we start paying market price to the parent who takes care of the kids irrespective of mothers or fathers ? Investing in next generation is way more important than making useless widgets faster.

Financial strains (family disposable income, high cost of living, wealth inequality)

Expand of electronic device use (from TVs to modern ones) and their apps

Convergence of gender roles, making males less masculine

General loss of classical values, promotion of easy life, short term goals and superficial qualities leading to misery and deactivation

If I do nothing both will be in their rooms all day. Makes me sick.

As a father I try and balance it out but I definitely don’t do as much as my dad did growing up.

This article, and the place it has on Hackernews and the quality of "commments" raises serious questions for me about Hacker News as a whole, the moderation, the readers and mechanism.

My complaint is not that this kind of thing exists. My complaint is that something better does not.

Good to know! I thought it was a bit weird for the team to have been disbanded so abruptly. Perhaps if this aspect of the story is not correct, other aspects will turn out to have been untrue as well.

What was my Dad busy doing? Focusing on his career in order to provide for his family. Doing hobbies that increased his skill set. Fixing the house to ensure we all had a nice safe place to live. Tending to the garden to keep the neighbours happy. Building ties with the community to increase our family's standing in the community and being able to call in favours in emergencies etc.

The 4 days off he had from his primary job, he worked multiple other jobs, creating multiple streams of family income.

It's so easy to view many of these things as him not tending to his family directly. That's incredibly short-sighted.

My mother appreciated very little of those things, and constantly nagged that he never did enough. She admitted many years later this was a big contributor to their divorce.

I think some modern opinions of parenting come from a very individualistic, transactional and reciprocal mindset. Eg "I spend 1 hour doing the dishes, you have to do something, today, and of equivalent value, to show you love us". What kind of foundation for a relationship is that? What happened to the power of a family?

I mentioned that I really felt how a space marine feels some days: https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Daily_rituals_of_a_Space_Ma...

Mostly in the short sleep period, but also in the 'free time' too. I tend to get about 30 minutes at the end of the day, after all have (finally) gone to sleep, but still.

I wonder what percentage of folks are now stuck in caretaking instead of raising their own families themselves. I basically predict my family line is extinct after my generation.