Scott Alexander

The Wisdom of the Ancients The first chart finds that 1960s mothers, including many stay-at-home mums, spent only half as long on primary childcare as modern parents.

How could this be?

Kaplan treats this question in the genre of life advice.

Why not relax and spend less time parenting like your grandparents did?

But to me it feels more like ancient occult wisdom.

If you heard that the people of 10,000 BC built vast crystal pyramids that channeled the music of the spheres into infinite free electricity, you wouldn't think, ah, nice, guess that gives me permission to relax and stop fretting so much about energy policy.

You would wonder how they accomplished this seemingly impossible feat.

Here's Kaplan's explanation.

Quote, End quote.

End quote.

Scott writes, this seems basically right.

I live just close enough to the tail end of this period to recognize the phrase, remember to be home by dinner.

Here's an image from Reddit.

It says, map comparing four generations of kids how far they're allowed to roam.

The mother, Vicky, aged 8 in 1979, was allowed to walk to the swimming pool alone half a mile away.

That's a little further to the north of Sheffield.

And the son, Ed, now eight, is only allowed to walk on his own to the end of the street.

That's 300 yards.

And in comparison to the great-grandfather's territory, this seems to be just a small dot.

Scott captions it, This map has radicalised lots of people on restoring children's right to roam.