Nothing gets easier in life, you just get better.

The phenomenon of 1.2 children per family living a living a childhood of endless leisure until being thrust into the world of adult responsibility at age 18 was totally unknown to humanity until about 5 minutes ago.

Sometimes a kid has to wash dishes. Other times he has to read his kid brother a bedtime story. I promise, they'll survive. They might even be better off as adults, being well-accustomed to small acts of charity and self-denial.

I was part of a verrry large family and wasn’t parentified, though it absolutely does happen.

I mean I didn’t want to play with mom, I wanted to run around in the cornfield with my brothers and play capture the flag or something. And having a chore schedule isn’t parentification.

The closest would be the oldest watching the youngers while mom & dad go on a date, but I mean we just put a movie on and there are pretty clear expectations around everything. No different than hiring a local teenager (who you know through a local family) to do brief childcare.

Parentification in my mind has to cross a line where one kid is kind of forced to always have to be responsible for raising the other kid. Like if your parents are really deadbeat and one kid actually takes responsibility.

A lot of people don't really get big families, which makes sense. You just have a different definition of “normal” for certain things because big families just HAVE to operate differently in a lot of ways, and a lot of norms we expect are products of living a specific way in your formative years. That’s just different, not necessarily bad

Yes that is how families functions, older take care of the younger to balance the load. The parent isnt a slave, everyone helps out once they're able.

Not always, Children always wanting an adult to run a circus for them also doesn't let them discover creativity through bordeom.

ids who are of a similar age can be guided to have activities they enjoy playing togeter.

Parentification is having to be responsible for the feelings and actions of an adult.

Historically, what you speak of is an idealized and generalized image. What village are you talking about? Where? When? What was the socioeconomic status of the family? Etc.

In reality it would vary whole lot, not just in terms of time and place in a general sense, but also for individual families. If you had many relatives nearby, perhaps, but in some cases you might not, or you might actually have to be taking care of not just your children but also your parents-in-law who are disabled and your aunt who is mentally unstable partially due to her own husband and children dying in the famine a couple years back.

And maybe you are also poor so you need to work land that isn't even your own, in addition to your own (maybe rented) plot, and you are socially shunned on top of that and your neighbors sure as hell aren't going to help out with your own children. But at least you only have two kids now since two died and you managed to give another away to live his whole life in a monastery.

I have been to many places, in different cultures, and countries. Outside of blood relationships and church, I have not seen a villager change a diaper for another without compensation.

People make up history out of romanticized ideas of it all too much. Aunts, friends, cousins and parents had all own children and housework to care for. And the young couple was expected to provide more then they took in terms of help.

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We’d bath twice a week or with a blowout. Our kids are still alive

I can't tell if you're hyperbolizing the idea of community, or describing schooling.

We been doin that

Have you ever seen an "elite" think beyond the edge of the quarter? Lords of the Ashes all.

Maternity leave is 4 months where I live, with many women afraid to express their desire to have kids in their jobs fearing they would be fired. Daycare is prohibitively expensive. A good education too.

Sure they grow up to join the workforce eventually, but 16-18 years doesn't show up in the quarterly reports, so the elites don't like it. I could be wrong, most likely am, but that's what I see and that's what these hostile practices represent.

>Kids eventually grow up and "start producing capital".

They can grow up in third-world countries where elites don't have to spend a dime. Then they lobby to import them by the millions to "start producing capital".

> It's definitely beneficial for the "elite" in the long term for people to have kids.

Why? The elites bank on AI and robots doing everything in the future. The plebs have no place in the visions of Musk, Thiel, Altman and the rest of the wankers.