I do not find parenting that difficult because I parent differently.
The alternative: Teach them to entertain themselves. They clean up their own messes. I have the kiddos do tasks with me. Babies are easy enough, toddlers need limited stuff to do as it is all about novelty. Kids 5+ can learn to entertain themselves with their talents, siblings, neighbors.
Our friends would be at our place a couple days a week and at my parent's friend's place a couple days a week.
Sure if you're not pulling your share some other compensation would be expected.
In reality it would vary whole lot, not just in terms of time and place in a general sense, but also for individual families. If you had many relatives nearby, perhaps, but in some cases you might not, or you might actually have to be taking care of not just your children but also your parents-in-law who are disabled and your aunt who is mentally unstable partially due to her own husband and children dying in the famine a couple years back.
And maybe you are also poor so you need to work land that isn't even your own, in addition to your own (maybe rented) plot, and you are socially shunned on top of that and your neighbors sure as hell aren't going to help out with your own children. But at least you only have two kids now since two died and you managed to give another away to live his whole life in a monastery.
The (literal) village did all of these things for my grandparents when they were raising my parents. Everyone’s kids were almost everyone else’s kids, fed by whoever, whenever. Few, if any vehicles to worry about, so lots of groups of kids wandering about after the initial toddler stage.
It's not in the cards for everyone.
Personally, we ended up living where my wife grew up and about an half hour from my fold, and were really social in the community. For my kids, that meant lots of cousins for the kids and a pretty rich social life for us. Lots of little league and community events. Folks didn’t change the diapers, but they had our backs in a thousand ways.
My sister and her husband live in a mega city a few hundred miles away. They are doing great, but they are doing it on their own. I think it’s harder on their kids in some ways, but they are doing fine.
IMO, “the village” is a better way to live and brings a lot to the table. But there’s no one answer.
(Every second day is fine, and better for their skin.)
The babies being potatoes phase if visiting my life again would benefit from transferable skills that you simply don't have as the first time parent.
A village where trusted neighbors and family members and a chain of kids in increasing ages can help look after each other.
It's by design. Kids don't produce capital for the elites. We peasants aren't supposed to have kids, just waste away grinding so that those in power can accumulate more power, because they can pay others and have as many kids as they want, but we from the middle class will struggle with one or two. It's a form of indirect classist populational control enforced by purchase power.
Kids eventually grow up and "start producing capital". It's definitely beneficial for the "elite" in the long term for people to have kids.
Sure they grow up to join the workforce eventually, but 16-18 years doesn't show up in the quarterly reports, so the elites don't like it. I could be wrong, most likely am, but that's what I see and that's what these hostile practices represent.
Why? The elites bank on AI and robots doing everything in the future. The plebs have no place in the visions of Musk, Thiel, Altman and the rest of the wankers.
They can grow up in third-world countries where elites don't have to spend a dime. Then they lobby to import them by the millions to "start producing capital".
With 4+ children, the kids almost never come to us for entertainment. They form their own little society and find tons of ways to play and interact with each other. The little ones are just as likely to ask one of their older siblings to read them a story as they are to ask a parent, for example.
Sure, things like laundry and meals always have toil that increases with family size, but kids can start helping with such things after age 7 or so.
Sometimes a kid has to wash dishes. Other times he has to read his kid brother a bedtime story. I promise, they'll survive. They might even be better off as adults, being well-accustomed to small acts of charity and self-denial.
I mean I didn’t want to play with mom, I wanted to run around in the cornfield with my brothers and play capture the flag or something. And having a chore schedule isn’t parentification.
The closest would be the oldest watching the youngers while mom & dad go on a date, but I mean we just put a movie on and there are pretty clear expectations around everything. No different than hiring a local teenager (who you know through a local family) to do brief childcare.
Parentification in my mind has to cross a line where one kid is kind of forced to always have to be responsible for raising the other kid. Like if your parents are really deadbeat and one kid actually takes responsibility.
A lot of people don't really get big families, which makes sense. You just have a different definition of “normal” for certain things because big families just HAVE to operate differently in a lot of ways, and a lot of norms we expect are products of living a specific way in your formative years. That’s just different, not necessarily bad
ids who are of a similar age can be guided to have activities they enjoy playing togeter.
Parentification is having to be responsible for the feelings and actions of an adult.
I took care of my sister when I was 7 and she was 3 because both parents worked all day.
I don’t think younger people are wired to be taking care of babies full time. I’d imagine in nature they’d be out hunting or gathering and our attention spans are wired for doing that.
For us (my partner and I) these discussions dovetail into discussions about community. Like, so much about modern, suburban, nuclear family stuff is really isolating for everyone involved. We don't know exactly where to go from here, but looking at the declining fertility rate, it does seem unsustainable.
Another part is that most modern parents are subject to predatory lending on a scale that would previously be unfathomable.
We just integrated the kids into our existing lives.
It's that parenting is exhausting.
I could do physical labor for hours. Code straight for hours.
But when I have to look after the 2 kids for 3 hours solo I'm totally exhausted. And I don't mean sit them in front of a TV - but actually try and feed them, change diapers, clean up after their messes, keep them entertained...
Weekends are suddenly way more exhausting than weekdays.
And then that compounds over weeks.
It's totally exhausting. The modern model is totally unsustainable/not scalable, but I'm not sure what the alternative should be.