Your parents by definition will only be able to spend 20% of the time on you that they could on a single child if they didn't neglect the others.
Seeing children with multiple siblings with less than 8 year difference between them vs single children is shocking just how differently kids are treated.
I would argue that your position is the "perfectionist parenting" nonsense that many have used to avoid having children.
Do you think all of the latchkey lone children of the current generation are the most psychologically healthy individuals the world has seen? Do you think they're the most loved or coddled? The most educated? Your anecdote is actually kind of hilarious in context.
The idea that 2 children splits the love or attention is absolutely insane.
>80% of kids under 18 have siblings in the USA today.
I wasn't claiming that all or most kids are single children. I was observing that by your philosophy those single children would somehow have the best outcomes (in a multivariate manner). I don't think that's the case.
It’s the same logic as: when I married, the time to cook each meal doubled. Ugh, no - many things scale vastly sublinearly with the number of kids one has.
And in the year of our lord 2025 it's normal not to have kids in the west.
In most of the rest of the world neither of those things were normal.
Which is the point.
The west is weird when it comes to raising children and has been uniquely bad at it for over 80 years which happens to be living memory for pretty much everyone on here.
80 years? Things started to go awry around 1970. That's when the Boy Scouts stopped treating scouts like young adults and instead began treating them like delicate flowers.
The great depression destroyed the social fabric of the us more thoroughly than did the civil war. The 1950s weren't normal, they were the result of a generations want for stability and domesticity when they had no idea what either looked like. For one thing the end of generational households to be replaced by nuclear family households was seen by the people at the time as worse than single parent households are today and with good reason.
That the majority of conservatives today pine for the 50s us that we not only lost the ability to have a stable society but even the memory of what one should look like.
