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Who Americans spend their time with, by age

ourworldindata.org

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Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age

#121

Post by 5555624 »

conradev wrote: post #75
burlesona wrote: post #36

The thing that seems crazy to me is how much time alone increases with age. There are many many reasons for it, but one thing I think is especially sad is how much this is a consequence of our built environment. If you live in a village with multiple generations of a family around, it’s much easier for grandparents to be involved day too day in helping with little things in the village, especially keeping an eye on t…

My grandma sold her house and we used some of the money to convert our garage into an apartment for her so that she could live with our family. Certainly not everyone can do this but living with your parents/grandparents as they get older does seem like a reasonable “fix” to me.

When my father's father passed away, my grandmother sold the house and bought a mobile home, which was put about 50 feet from her daughter's house. (This was in rural Pennsylvania.) It worked out great for more than 30 years. She could be alone, she could be with family.

Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age

#122

Post by tcbawo »

rochak wrote: post #66
torgian wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this is a poor substitute for real physical connection with other people.

Can confirm. I used to like staying alone and being connected via social media. Now, I don’t enjoy that anymore. Maybe it is because I am tired of the dopamine hits social media provides.

Social media as it currently exists isn't going to substitute personal relationships. It misses the trees for the forest (personal vs tribal). To me, it feels like being at a party where I only know a handful of people and I have to shout to communicate with the people I do know. But, technology can connect people with shared interests and activities and facilitate one-on-one communication. People who are into baseball cards or bird watching can find each other. Technology has the capacity to enrich long term relationships. I think we're still figuring it all out.

Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age

#123

Post by lojack »

leesalminen wrote: post #26
dcolkitt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m the parent of a young child and I definitely feel some sort of internal pressure to be all babies all the time. I feel pretty guilty leaving him with anyone other than my wife. All I can think to myself is whether what I’m doing is really worth it compared to spending time with the baby.

I don't even necessarily think its just leaving your baby alone with other people. Pre-covid with a I suspect there has always been pressure to not leave your baby with someone else and go off and do your own thing. The difference is now people are physically more distant from everyone else (I blame the ease of transportation) so being around close friends and family is the exception and not the standard.

Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age

#125

Post by chrisseaton »

burlesona wrote: post #36

The thing that seems crazy to me is how much time alone increases with age. There are many many reasons for it, but one thing I think is especially sad is how much this is a consequence of our built environment. If you live in a village with multiple generations of a family around, it’s much easier for grandparents to be involved day too day in helping with little things in the village, especially keeping an eye on t…

> living in a nice little garden home far removed from any day to day life going on

Don’t you have neighbours and normal community areas in this case? Doesn’t that count as day to day life? What else are you expecting?

Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age

#126

Post by throwaway0a5e »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #114
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The western nuclear family is exactly what you get in agrarian societies of the past. It wasn't just some random thing the people of the 1950s made up on the spot. When 4/6 of your sons grow to adulthood you can't live in the same household as all of them. You live with one of them (probably the most or least functional one). 2 of the others have their own farms (one probably gets yours, maybe you split your farm bet…

> The western nuclear family is exactly what you get in agrarian societies of the past. Absolutely not - and I have direct experience of this. First: multi generational households are extremely common. Second: people, including children, spend tons of time with other people outside of the parent-child relation. Relatives, often cousins, granparents, and neighbors. This is still the case for most agrarian societies ou…

>Absolutely not - and I have direct experience of this.

Everyone who has direct experience of this time has been dead for half a century at least.

>First: multi generational households are extremely common.

Define "extremely common". What percent of people in a given society in a given time period do you think grew up in one?

>Second: people, including children, spend tons of time with other people outside of the parent-child relation. Relatives, often cousins, granparents, and neighbors.

Nobody is debating this. Of course prior to the industrial revolution people moved around less so your friends and neighbors are more likely to be your cousins and if grandma is nearby she'll wind up babysitting more. I don't see this as being meaningful to this discussion since they are outside one's household.

>This is still the case for most agrarian societies outside of the English-speaking world.

Back this up with numbers. Grandma has to live somewhere, but for an child in any given agrarian society to be more likely than not to have have grandma living under the same roof birth rates need to be low to the point of apocalyptic.

>The obsession with the hyper nuclear and exclusionary family is very american.

Is the fact that it's an American obsession supposed to be a bad thing?

Yes, multi generational households were far, far more common from the grandparent's perspective in the past because elderly parents living alone was far, far less common. But from the perspective of the child growing up they still far from the default. The birth rates are simply too high for them to have been default. Nobody here is saying mutligenerational households are bad but the people who think they were default have a skewed understanding of history. Calling something that just has to happen by mathematical necessity "unnatural" (i.e. the comment my initial comment replied to) seems a little over the top.

Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age

#127

Post by arcticfox »

silveroriole wrote: post #94
Dirlewanger wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a truly bizarre sentiment. Just because the kids move out means they're completely out of your life?

Well, it’s not my sentiment, it’s the figure in the graph!

Right, but to make your point, you made the incredibly bold assumption that every minute is equally as valuable as every other minute. So because time with children = one TV episode of time, it can't be that important.

Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age

#128

Post by _qulr »

danenania wrote: post #120
_qulr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, we don't need anthropology to tell us that inactivity and excessive calorie consumption are bad. And the solution to obesity and similar problems is certainly not to return to hunter-gatherer society. Evolution is just a red herring here. It can tell us how we got here, but not how to move forward.

To be clear, I'm not arguing for a return to hunter-gatherer society. But we should certainly consider the environment that our bodies and minds were developed and optimized for, and that our species lived in for 99% of its history, as we decide how to structure our current environment. To say that evolution is a "red herring" is absurd. It has literally determined every aspect of our being. You can't move forward wi…

> It has literally determined every aspect of our being. You can't move forward without understanding what got you where you are.

So has physics. Why stop at hunter-gatherers, why not go back to the Big Bang? Would you argue that we need to study astrophysics to deal with obesity?

It's not absurd at all to suggest that evolution is a red herring, any more than it's absurd to suggest that astrophysics is a red herring. Prehistoric archaeology is highly speculative at best. I'm not saying it's unscientific, I'm just saying there are a lot of things about prehistoric societies that we could be very wrong about, due to lack of direct observation and evidence, and thus it would a poor guide for our current and future societies even if we decided to base our behavior on our ancestors (which we shouldn't).

Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age

#129

Post by devchix »

bogdan314 wrote: post #48
burlesona wrote: post #36

The thing that seems crazy to me is how much time alone increases with age. There are many many reasons for it, but one thing I think is especially sad is how much this is a consequence of our built environment. If you live in a village with multiple generations of a family around, it’s much easier for grandparents to be involved day too day in helping with little things in the village, especially keeping an eye on t…

happy news. The study does mention at the end that spending time alone dose not mean the individual feels lonely. Then reference this[1] article for more details. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/lonely-not-alone

The reverse is worse, I think, feeling lonely while surrounded by people, or being with people who make you feel alone. I recommend a film called Somewhere by Sofia Coppola, it's about an actor (not old) going through the motions of his life, always surrounded by people, yet his internal landscape is vast emptiness. There's a scene where he falls asleep while watching twin pole dance routine in his hotel room! Coppola has a good eye for these "lonely in a crowded place" condition. The female character at a temple in Tokyo in Lost In Translations comes to mind, and the Bill Murray character calling home. Likewise Marie Antoinette, two characters isolated and lonely, navigating the party atmosphere in the Chateau Marmont of its time.

Re: Who Americans spend their time with, by age

#130

Post by burade »

Swizec wrote: post #88
frakt0x90 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experienced this first hand when I visited my wife's family in Vietnam. All 10 or so of them live in homes side by side on the outskirts of Saigon. Everyone woke up in the morning and cooked for each other. Every day was like a little party. It was so nice to have that much support around all the time. I have never experienced anything like that in the US. Of course having family literally at your doorstep has its…

My mom always said ”Move far away enough that your parents can’t visit in their slippers, trust me you don’t want that kinda meddling” I moved to USA. “Damn it I didn’t mean that far” ~ mom My sister lives with her boyfriend in his mom’s house. There is indeed a ridiculous amount of meddling even though they’re technically separate households.

It's only meddling if you're way too stressed out by trying to keep up with capitalism.

If you live a simple life without too much stress then it's not really meddling.

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