Some interesting points here, which I think sheds some light on why childhood today in the nihilistic, post-Christian industrial western world can be such a miserable experience. Mine was certainly one of consistent boredom, spiritually-sterile surroundings, and a general lack of direction.
Though, I think that the elephant in the room is the fact that children today are an economic burden. Specifically, children in our technological/industrial society that is almost completely urbanized. Kids are expensive. Notably, kids who don't do any work, which is practically all of them. Today's average spoiled brat doesn't do anything productive until they are in their early 20s (university "education" is a great way of delaying this even further). Compare to the children of yore who usually pitched in on the farm and helped care for the other kids and any family elders around. Agrarian societies make much better use of children and give meaning to their lives from early on.
The baby elephant in the room is atomized nuclear family being the default family arrangement today. Nuclear families are something quite abnormal when we take reality of all cultures at all times into consideration; it's something peculiar to modern people living in crowded cities and sprawling suburbs. Extended families (plus clans/tribes or tight-knit religious communities) used to be the norm across the board. Before the advent of the welfare state and modern medicine, the extended family and village/clan pitched in when it came to raising the kids, and the kids stared paying this back the moment they were able to perform menial tasks.
Finally, on the teen pregnancy issue, when we remove the Judeo-Christian moralistic overlay on this issue, this seems less disastrous under the arrangement of large extended families (uncles, aunts, cousins, ect.) who are willing to help raise the "bastard kids" until they are old enough to earn their keep around the house. But with today's atomized micro-households, I think this is just plain disastrous economically speaking, even when we take the mitigating effects of bureaucratic social welfare (again, fueled by cheap oil) into account. That's why teen pregnancy in today's society is almost always a one-way ticket to intergenerational poverty. You can't cram a lively village into a 800 sqft. apartment or small family home. In general, think our ancestors were much wiser than most of us today give them credit for.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2022-07-28 03:43 pm (UTC)Though, I think that the elephant in the room is the fact that children today are an economic burden. Specifically, children in our technological/industrial society that is almost completely urbanized. Kids are expensive. Notably, kids who don't do any work, which is practically all of them. Today's average spoiled brat doesn't do anything productive until they are in their early 20s (university "education" is a great way of delaying this even further). Compare to the children of yore who usually pitched in on the farm and helped care for the other kids and any family elders around. Agrarian societies make much better use of children and give meaning to their lives from early on.
The baby elephant in the room is atomized nuclear family being the default family arrangement today. Nuclear families are something quite abnormal when we take reality of all cultures at all times into consideration; it's something peculiar to modern people living in crowded cities and sprawling suburbs. Extended families (plus clans/tribes or tight-knit religious communities) used to be the norm across the board. Before the advent of the welfare state and modern medicine, the extended family and village/clan pitched in when it came to raising the kids, and the kids stared paying this back the moment they were able to perform menial tasks.
Finally, on the teen pregnancy issue, when we remove the Judeo-Christian moralistic overlay on this issue, this seems less disastrous under the arrangement of large extended families (uncles, aunts, cousins, ect.) who are willing to help raise the "bastard kids" until they are old enough to earn their keep around the house. But with today's atomized micro-households, I think this is just plain disastrous economically speaking, even when we take the mitigating effects of bureaucratic social welfare (again, fueled by cheap oil) into account. That's why teen pregnancy in today's society is almost always a one-way ticket to intergenerational poverty. You can't cram a lively village into a 800 sqft. apartment or small family home. In general, think our ancestors were much wiser than most of us today give them credit for.