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Sitting at home watching soap operas and scrolling tiktok while helicopter parenting your children away from learning basic responsibilities and competence is not productive.
Parents already spend more time with their children now. So much that in many ways it's to the detriment of the kids! My parents used to go out and play when they were young, now children can't even walk to a nearby pond in gated communities. I can't even let my own children have independence even if I wanted to (which I do), they literally are not allowed to grow as normal human beings used to because the cops might show up cause they're out on the front yard!
We need less "parenting" and more freedom so kids can actually be mature instead of still crying for their mommies in college!
It's a lose lose lose. This welfare society drains money from productive members, encourages welfare leeching, and cripples the growth of our youth even more.
This is absurdly uncharitable. I'm sure you can find women who are shirking responsibility and ruining their kids, but there are far more women who would do right by their kids given the chance to do so. Besides that, someone has to raise the kids, and their parents are going to do a much better job, on average, than daycare operators or teachers.
We already do spend more time with our kids than previous generations. The very basis that current parents aren't "given the chance to do so" is factually wrong.
Am I supposed to believe that the silent gen/baby boomer/Gen x parents were all just unloving and bad? No, I don't think that's the case.
What we do see however is overparenting. Helicopter parents who won't even let their tweens go to another aisle in a grocery store, who simply wouldn't let their teenagers out of sight in a mall even if malls were still a thing, people who show up and do their kids laundry in university! I had a great 25-26 year old intern fresh graduate who still had her mother trying to butt in once when something happened at my work. She's lucky I'm very forgiving and understanding of her situation and I know that she was embarrassed about it too (I even helped her find a better living situation) but it's another example of how a lot of parents are so crazy nowadays like that.
If I was a typical boss and wasn't well aware of how helicopter parenting was harming children and their independence already I might not have been as kind to her as I was, and she might have been stuck unable to free herself for even longer as she lost job after job because she got stuck with a crazy mother. This shit is getting far more common. Kids need more freedom and independence so they can grow and thrive, not even more time being dependent on their mommies and daddies.
Which is about children under eighteen and explicitly controls for children under five. Helicopter parenting a 16 year old and taking care of a 2 year old are not the same thing, even if they both are literally "spend time with kids".
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I'm not talking about people not spending time with their kids, and I have no idea why you are going on that road. I'm saying that someone has to be around to keep an eye on little kids. You need to change diapers if they are young enough, make them some food for lunch, etc. None of this requires the type of helicopter parenting you are bringing up out of nowhere. But it does require someone to be home, and many parents feel that they can't afford to have only one income in the household.
How do you think that sort of thing can be measured besides time spent with the children?
Yeah, I'm a parent myself I'm well aware of this. Both me and my wife even took extended leave off for our children so we could spend the first year or so which we are fortunate enough to have saved up enough to do. But even then we still had daycare and stuff for them! Even at that very young age it is good for the children to have time away from us learning to navigate the world of other adults and their peers.
My kids are far more dependable and mature than many of the other children in parents groups I've taken a part in and that's because we are not coddling. And our kids are still less independent than what my own parents experienced in their youth, in part because we don't have the freedom to send them on errands and such. There needs to be less parenting among many of these families, not more.
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This Virginia SAHM mom you linked, mother and 8 months pregnant, while also studying for the bar, is your shining example of a welfare leech draining from other productive members of society? This argument is so lacking I can't help but feel you are actually setting up a strawman argument in favor of the $9K SAHM subsidy.
No, and I'm doubting your reading ability here that you think I'm giving her as an example of welfare leeching and not as an example of how society is coddling children through demands of overparenting given the surrounding context of my paragraph about that exact topic. Only the youngest of children need a 24/7 helicopter watch team over them, and yet we're extending it out to tweens not even going to other aisles in a grocery store.
This "parenting" is the exact opposite of productive, and we need less of it.
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