@csc112012 A lot of them get away by basically asking the eldest to become to nanny. It’s parentification and it’s a form of abuse. But that’s what happen when people don’t plan.
@jstanley7 You see that all the time in the big fundie families. Not fundies, but the Mormons I know who are under about 60 (so gen X and younger) go for much smaller families than they grew up with, even if they are not one and done. A Mormon couple I know who each were among the younger of 6 or 7 kids was “two and through.” Not one and done but a huge change from what they grew up with, both because raising kids is more expensive and effortful, and they wanted to pay attention to their kids and not have them parentified like their older siblings or lost in the shuffle and ignored except for discipline like they were.
I always considered my mother to be a good mom with a solid head on her shoulders and I realized after having my own daughter that it wasn't much the case. She and other boomers told me that they didn't think before having kids at all. "we were care-free" they said to me. And if I ask her "how did you do it when I was a kid?" she says "I dunno".
How emotionally neglectful she was of me. How often I was left totally alone. ALL that bagage that I have to bear and its weight being heavier now that I am also a mom. AND she told me that if my father hadn't died of cancer (he was 30 years older than her... sorry but of course he was going to die sonner rather than later tbh) she would have had more kids! Mam, you seemed to be overwhelmed with lil me who was "so calm and soft-spoken and polite", do you hear yourself??
@evalove I just came to see this take lol. It's kind of like when people say its easier to raise boys than girls. It's not easier, its just that expectations for boys are so low that we have to raise girls to be aware of the boys and their lack of home training/skills and (at worst) their predatory behavior
@evalove I think there’s external factors that arguably make it challenging. But the biggest one for us, is, we’re so emotionally invested in our OAD’s needs, from our emotional availability to offering structure and building trust to nutrition in the age of vitamin D deficiencies being tied to childhood cancer. I personally know I can’t do it a at 100% all the time with more than one kid.
@evalove this so much. I worry so much about traumatizing my child that it just wears me out. What if I ignore him too long when he is doing todder stuff, and it comes back to negatively effective emotionally later in life lol.
@mikecrb I think more than anything it's that it's MORE EXPENSIVE. Especially if you're in the US and don't have access to affordable health care. I had "great" health insurance and still had to pay over 5k just to give birth.
My son went to preschool PART TIME and it was $1,000 a month.
Then add in the cost of housing had grown exponentially, especially in the last few years that there's just not any money left over for kids these days.
@mikecrb Yes there’s ALOT more pressure to be the perfect parent today. Especially on social media you have opinions coming at you 24/7 on everything from screen time to what you feed your kids to sleep. Of course opinions always existed but now they’re in your face 24/7.
Plus women 30 years ago would mostly just solely focus on the family, now you have to be the perfect mom & perfect worker. Even mothers who want to be a sahm can’t afford it, a lot of people need two incomes today to survive due to rising costs. A lot of mothers are burnt out from the mental load (even if you share with a partner). I think other reasons are cost of raising a child and lack of family support!
@mikecrb Until the 90s, the moms would tell the kids to play outside all day and come home when the streetlights turn on. The yard with all the bikes in the front is the one where the gang was at. Do you know how much I could get done if my 4 year left me alone longer than 10 minutes?
Stats show that moms also spent less time with kids over all. Good parenting back then meant taking care of their biological needs, that’s it. Good parenting now means taking care of their mental health as well as fighting off all the malignant food production and marketing efforts. The same food in the 80s was way more nutritionally dense than it is now. Also, no longer dumping kids at grandparents for the summer (cause they could afford to retire or grandma was a SAHM) and with creepy uncles. Actually reading to the kids and not just for bed time. Helping them thru a lot more competitive college path and still having to pay $100k for 4 years of tuition cause financial aid doesn’t cover middle class families.
@unseenunknown Also - there is the expectation, which our grandmothers and certainly great-grandmothers did not have, that when you have a child, you see them live to grow up. Sanitation, vaccines, and car seats mean that you can be one and done and confident that child will live to adulthood, barring a rare tragedy.
Time was when you had five kids hoping that two or three would live to adulthood. Now you can have one kid and expect a grown child at the end.
@cmurawski This is a really excellent point. Plus, even a generation or two ago, in farming areas families deliberately had a bunch of kids so they'd have farm labour.
@ryspi76 Both my grandmothers raised their children (also both were two and through even in the 30’s, make of that what you will) to adulthood. However, going backwards, of my four great-grandmothers, only one (maternal grandmother’s mom) had both her kids live. (Notice SHE was two and through. I have a sneaking feeling that side of the family, including my mom, had kids because “that’s what you do.”) Two of my other great-grandmothers lost one (that we know of), and one lost two out of four.
I think whether all your kids lived was dependent on socioeconomic status and where they lived. Great-grandma whose daughters lived to grow up was middle-class and lived in a small town, so the kids were well fed and didn’t have contact with the kind of germs you got in a city.
@mikecrb I really hope OAD is more common now because more people realize that the planet can’t sustain everyone having tons of kids.
Parenting is hard, only made harder by too many kids and not enough supervisors.
@mikecrb For me, I actually didn’t want kids to begin with and my son was a surprise. I had an IUD and he won. I love my son to death and I love being his mom. He is also Autistic and while he does not require a ton of support, I cannot imagine bringing another child into this world when my son requires me to be a bit more attentive than a neurotypical kid.
Kudos to parents that have multiple kids while having neurodivergent children, but it just doesn’t sound fun for me personally.
@maurothecatholicninja1 I know two families who each have two neurodivergent children (all ASD, with some ADHD and sensory processing issues here and there) and my heart just breaks for them at times, I really see them struggle.
