Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
And as a society we’re probably lazier and less active than ever before.
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Probably. I doubt our grandparents would have characterized going to Chinook to buy a new hoodie at Uniqlo and having trouble finding a parking space as ‘exhausting’.
Also, our life arcs have changed our perspectives. Women used to start having kids at 20-21. So they had only a short period of child-free adulthood. Now, men and women will often have 15 years of childfree adulthood, some of it still having meals, cleaning, shopping, etc taken care of by parents, and some of it living in their own place where they probably aren’t cooking every day and keeping a spotless house. Lots of freedom and time. That becomes the norm.
Then kids come - or buying a home and needing to budget, shop, take cleaning seriously, etc - and it’s a huge step up in demands and responsibility. There’s a reason “adulting” has become a verb.
And as GGG remarked, expectations around child-rearing are higher than before. Keeping them fed, clothed, and out of jail used to be the expectation. Now kids are driven everywhere in endless rounds of enrichment activities. That labour falls disproportionately on women. But in my experience, it’s also mostly moms who have turned parenting into a kind of competition.