I don't even want kids. I don't know why the 'time spent with one's children' line hurts so much, but it does. It sharply rises, before plummeting at age 40. That's got to be a jarring transition. No wonder so many folks have trouble with the 'empty nest' and mid-life crisis.
Who Americans spend their time with, by age
11–20 of 432 posts
Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age
#12This data makes me sad just looking at the parents, children, and coworker lines. This isn't how it should be...
Agreed. But a silver lining of the pandemic is that my wife is now my office mate. As a result, we've spent the majority of most days together over the last 8 months and I could not be happier!
Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age
#13This data makes me sad just looking at the parents, children, and coworker lines. This isn't how it should be...
Have you considered this is a good thing?
Parents and children are a generation away, there are flights over cultural differences that drive wedges. I'm glad I only see my Fox News repeating parents once a week.
However my co-workers are my peers who I can bounce ideas off.
This isn't new or Western either. Japan has a phrase "Foolish father" that both means what it sounds like, but also respect that everyone has a father. A more general term "filial piety".
Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age
#14I don't even want kids. I don't know why the 'time spent with one's children' line hurts so much, but it does. It sharply rises, before plummeting at age 40. That's got to be a jarring transition. No wonder so many folks have trouble with the 'empty nest' and mid-life crisis.
> I don't even want kids. I don't know why the 'time spent with one's children' line hurts so much, but it does.
Do you maybe not want kids on a rational level, but still want kids on an emotional level?
Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age
#15This data makes me sad just looking at the parents, children, and coworker lines. This isn't how it should be...
>This isn't how it should be... What makes you say that?
Humans are naturally social creatures.
I wonder if this graph is missing a data point of time spent with strangers. (caregivers and the like)
Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age
#16This data makes me sad just looking at the parents, children, and coworker lines. This isn't how it should be...
Agreed. But a silver lining of the pandemic is that my wife is now my office mate. As a result, we've spent the majority of most days together over the last 8 months and I could not be happier!
Yeah, I imagine this is testing some marriages, but I think my spouse and I are both happier for spending more time together. It really depends on living arrangements as well - just our office space is nearly as large as our first apartments entire living space so we can take the time apart we need.
Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age
#17FTA: Older people spend more time alone, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lonely
Why bother saying this? We know it’s not true.
Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age
#18I don't even want kids. I don't know why the 'time spent with one's children' line hurts so much, but it does. It sharply rises, before plummeting at age 40. That's got to be a jarring transition. No wonder so many folks have trouble with the 'empty nest' and mid-life crisis.
The Western nuclear family is a very unnatural social arrangement. Anthropologists have found that in most hunter-gatherers, the average infant is held at one point or another by 30+ people in a typical day.
The nuclear family has the twin downsides of putting tons of stress on parents of young kids, who shoulder the entire childcare burden, and deprives a lot of grandparents, aunts, cousins, and others of meaningful childcare time. In the industrialized West, for most people it's either all babies all the time, or no babies whatsoever. Both extremes are suboptimal relative to the environment humans evolved for.
Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age
#19I don't even want kids. I don't know why the 'time spent with one's children' line hurts so much, but it does. It sharply rises, before plummeting at age 40. That's got to be a jarring transition. No wonder so many folks have trouble with the 'empty nest' and mid-life crisis.
> I don't even want kids. I don't know why the 'time spent with one's children' line hurts so much, but it does. Do you maybe not want kids on a rational level, but still want kids on an emotional level?
Probably this. Also, people are really bad at "knowing" what they want.
Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age
#20I wonder what are the strategies folks can adopt to see that they don't become victims of loneliness.