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Presumably, "in America" or "in the Western world". As soon as you have a child, you are a slave to it by proxy. You have to raise it as the powerful members of your community wish it to be raised, or face social and governmental wrath. This has always been true, though state capacity increasing has made it worse -- getting disapproving sniffs from those who don't like the way you raise your child is not as bad as disapproving sniffs plus stern letters from "educators" and visits from CPS or the local police. And, the way they want children to be raised has gotten more and more intensive. Full time personal supervision of them. Not just school but all sorts of "enriching" activities. Every sort of safety measure. Supporting them until they finish undergraduate. Etc.
Yeah I've transitioned from having my first child in Australia as a nuclear family to having a second child in SEA with a far-larger extended family present, nanny and a culture that's generally more childfriendly. The amount of quality of life I've received back due to moving is insane, and it's better for the kids as well. Nuclear family two working parents trying to negotiate a child is absolutely punitive.
Can you please explain in what sense is Southeast Asian culture more child-friendly than Australian culture?
People way more comfortable interacting with strangers' small children than in Australia since there are more small children around. Essentially everywhere has ample childseats. Carseat legislation has tradeoffs but less enforcement makes being ad-hoc with children a lot easier. Difference in wages means that most service jobs are way more staffed here so you get a lot more active assistance with children whilst dining and whatnot.
I think the more likely explanation is that the pedophile predator threat is part of the public consciousness in Australia but not in SE Asia. And I doubt the fertility rate is higher in SE Asia than in Australia.
Do you mean restaurants and third places in general?
Malaysia 1.6 per capita to Australia at 1.48 which isn't a huge gap, though also going to likely be magnified by me going from a relatively big city to somewhere more suburban. There is a massive increase in child-friendly infrastructure here, though.
Malaysia has gotten far wealthier and more comfortable in the last 30 years, especially in and around the major cities and especially in KL. This changes the whole mindset. The really big living standards boom in the Anglo countries was after WW2, the only people who remember it are very old.
Even where Anglo countries have done well economically (which includes Australia and, for the last fifteen years, the US) the foundation was already a high degree of material prosperity. Malaysians (and Chinese) seem materially happy because many more of them remember genuine poverty.
Yeah. Anglo countries have largely stalled in terms of effective infrastructure for the last decade or two (albeit there hasn't been a ton of killer apps aside from maybe HSR) and then decided to deliberately enshittify what they do have with refusing to do anything about homeless drug users. A bunch of Asian places have fresh-build infrastructure from the last 10 years so they're generally on parity.
Also with child-friendly infrastructure a ton of it is just contingent on having enough children using it to be comfortable, which isn't something you can really spend your way through. I can think of plenty of superaffluent areas of the world where I wouldn't particularly want to handle having young kids.
I'd say they're better than merely on parity, to the degree that construction techniques and materials science in the '00s and '10s was better than it was in the '60s and '70s. Questionable quality control might offset that a bit, though.
HSR is kind of a meme in the US because its hybrid private-public transit infrastructure, which takes up a significant amount of space (every building has a station beneath it that usually stores at least one bus per tenant), is already so good that they don't really need it. Mandating the speed limit on the highways be increased to 100 mph would probably be just as time and cost-effective if not more so (yes, it burns more fuel, but the cost of that is just as much a tax as raising revenue for HSR would be).
Sure, the HSR might technically be faster, but now you're dependent on public transit to do anything, which is generally so slow that the time lost to driving still arguably makes sense (or you have to rent a car to get where you're going). Air travel has the same problem, actually- its average speed is about HSR-tier thanks to the TSA- but air travel has no need for rails, which means zero infrastructure spend, zero public upkeep beyond ATC, zero need to level the terrain, zero need to acquire terrain, and nearly zero ability for hecklers to veto via environmental complaint.
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