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This excellent piece on age segregation has got me thinking about how serious and pervasive this problem is. As the author states:
As discussed in @2rafa's post downthread, a major issue of the fertility crisis is a lack of time. Another issue it seems is a lack of even interacting with children unless you have some yourself, or have some in your family. I wonder if the lack of time among young adults in the West is causative of this age segregation?
Regardless, it likely has its roots in the K-12 education system. It's profoundly unnatural from a cultural standpoint to only be in the same peer group as people right around your age. I'm convinced it's unhealthy, and it predisposes us in a massive way to only socialize with people close to our age.
Do you think age segregation is an issue as well? If not, why not?
I think the thing that the ‘tradwife’ (almost always sitcom nuclear family tradwife, not how it actually was) memes don’t get is that many women don’t want to spend more than a decade without much adult company. Yeah, yeah, working for the man may be soulless or whatever, but you can make friends, you can gossip, you can go out for a drink after work or have lunch with your coworkers, you work together with other adults to achieve goals through the daytime hours.
I like children fine enough (and so did my mother) but to be the stereotypical suburban American SAHM you need to like children so much that you are fine only hanging out with them for a huge chunk of your life. Even on the weekend and in the evening mothers are primary parents. If you don’t have relatives nearby, then until the last kid goes to school, you’re mostly a 24/7/365 parent with the exception of times you pay for daycare (and while the kids are at school, at least for the first few years, much of your day is still going to be solo domestic chores or errands).
This means that, at least among smart or educated women who choose when or if they have kids, often only those most set on motherhood have children. People on the fence might like the idea of having children, might feel the biological imperative, but they override it because it seems like an impossible sacrifice.
Sometimes online SAHMs try to justify this lifestyle (I’m happy for those who enjoy it, by the way) by telling me how important it is to be around for every milestone, every development, to know everything about one’s children, to be deeply and thoroughly involved in every aspect of their education (maybe even homeschooling, which is especially popular on the right). But like, I don’t really care if I’m not around for a specific milestone. I’m sure I’ll love my children, but like my mother I doubt I’ll feel extreme pangs of jealousy if my kid sees their nanny as a maternal figure (as I did mine). And having accepted that most personality traits and intelligence are largely hereditary, pouring immense personal time into homeschooling seems redundant, as it’s unlikely to make a substantial difference to life outcomes (as Cochran etc have shown).
This idea of leaving one life and entering another (which again, if you like the company of other adults, is strictly worse in ways) is what scares many women about parenthood. Your social world goes from being huge to being yourself, your husband, some couples friends you see a few times a year and maybe another mother or two you see sometimes. Ideally the latter are pre-existing friends but often even this isn’t possible. The great majority of the time you’re alone with the kids (or just alone if they’re at school and you’re cleaning/cooking/shopping). You can see this even in the thread posted this week by someone asking where they could meet similar mothers, and where people were very excited by the idea some might live near each other. It’s clear this is a lonely business, and women are smart enough to realize it.
Many mothers don’t need to ‘work’ necessarily, but I think in many cases they need regular, consistent, significant time away from their children and/or in the company of other adults throughout their childhood. I think many women I know would be more willing to have children if they could be guaranteed this as an option. Currently it’s limited to the rich and to those people who still live in remaining tight-knit traditional communities.
You repeatedly call this a lack of adult company, but the problem you describe is not leaving the company of adults, but one of changing from socializing with non-parents to socializing with other parents. As a SAHM after the first year or so your free time is mostly during the workday, while non-SAHMs mostly have time to socialize after the work day ends (which for parents corresponds to mealtime and bedtime). To put it another way, motherhood comes with all the social detriments of a long-distance move. (But people still move all the time.)
Having experienced a modern society where SAHMs are normal, the first year of the first child is all about baby all the time, but the moms still socialize: they have support groups with other moms of their age group, call friends, use social media, and get a lot of emotional, logistical support, and time off via their parents and parents-in-law. Then once the kid socializes well with other kids they start meeting other moms almost daily, chatting while the kids play. The conversation is mostly centered on parenting, but that's mostly because, as you note, intellectuals aren't having kids.
As soon as the kids go to school (or usually preschool) then these SAHMs either gradually start working part-time or spend large portions of their days with their friends. I used to work in cafes a lot. There were many groups of SAHMs who would come into the cafe after lunch and spend roughly 1 PM to 5 PM hanging out. Book clubs, sports clubs, investment clubs. Of course, this society is almost invisible to non-SAHMs, because non-SAHMs are confined to the workplace during the day in places far away from where people live and where toddlers are raised. To the extent that non-mothers are ignorant of how much adult interaction SAHMs can get, I guess one might steelman your precise wording, but the true core of the issue here is that it's a change in social groups, not completely isolating. Unless you are in the top 5% of IQ, in which case you probably moved away from your parents and none of your friends who share your interests have had kids yet. Which I guess describes the average person in the Bay Area rational community as well as the average Mottizen.
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