If you aren't a slave to your car, you likely live in a walkable area where the cost of a 4-bedroom apartment or house is going to be pretty high. I'm not saying you can't raise kids in a 2 or 3 bedroom apartment, and when I lived in apartments many families had kids in a 1-bedroom apartment, but it's very tight and many people would consider it a significant hardship for both the kids and the parents.
I would also add as a car slave that the kinds of cars large enough to fit the kinds of car seats marketed in the US are tens of thousands more than a compact or mid-size sedan, and that in a mid-size sedan having a car seat in the rear-facing configuration significantly constrains how far back you can put the passenger or driver seat. This is true even for the narrower seats that are designed for three-across seating. And worse, you might not have the latch system or an appropriate kind of seat belt on that third seat.
> If you aren't a slave to your car, you likely live in a walkable area where the cost of a 4-bedroom apartment or house is going to be pretty high.
Or you're one of the millions of people who live in developing countries which have low cost of living and low housing costs. Coincidentally this group has very high birth rates.
Also, socially conservative, multi-generational households (sharing labour and childcare between women relatives), less expectation for mothers of young kids to be away from the home, and a much lower expectation of what "housing" means in terms of both building quality and the amount of living space per person.
Work and wider social participation, and a sprawling suburban geography that has people living far from friends and family.
The alternative - small, crowded population centres where everyone knows everyone and three, even four generations live in the same household can of course be limiting, even suffocating.
But there's a reason why, for all that the 1950s autonomous nuclear family is held up as some kind of ideal by tradwife fetishists, it's also the milieu in which Valium and sleeping pills became popularised.
Worse. Some people even deleet all of there online banking, except, for an account that can recieve funds from online sources, and then deal with everything in person at the bank.
Which then frees up devices to skip the whole closed source misery go round.
I would never use a bank that required a smartphone in order to access your money or do normal banking activities like transfers and payments. Fortunately here in the USA there are thousands of little mom n pop banks and credit unions, so I think we are safe from that madness at least until I’m dead and buried.
I know people doing this in Prince William County, Cheyenne, and Minnesota college towns. It just takes ordinary frugality, no deprivation that I can see.
Only on very modern times would you feel the need to have that many bedrooms for 3 kids. Of course that’s because you can’t banish the kids from the house until sunset anymore
If you make kids share a bedroom it drastically decreases the margin for tension between children because they don't have anywhere else. That can work, of course, but it might not and too fucking late for the kids if it doesn't. That can mean physical abuse, but it can mean things like one kid loves loud music and the other wants to read quietly alone, or their sleep schedules naturally don't align well - if you were an adult house share you'd say well, we're just incompatible, it's nobody's fault, I'll move out, but kids can't do that, they are stuck with the situation their parents created and it's all they know.
My mother - I found out years after I'd left home - was worried that I resented the fact I had a small bedroom while my younger sister got a larger one - but in reality I didn't care at all, she's an artist, she makes stuff which actually exists, of course she needs space; I write software, which conveniently takes up no space, whereas if I'd had to share with her that would be extremely problematic and wouldn't have gone well. I could be in my tiny room and that was enough.
Having grown up in a family large enough that giving each of us our own room was not even an aspiration, this point of view just doesn't make any sense to me. You learn to get along, that's what happens. You learn to respect shared spaces and accommodate other's needs. The kind of individualism you describe is a luxury, and one can live well without it.
Some friends were able to provide separate bedrooms to their sons last year. The older one already has a man-shaped face and body (still an adolescent voice and personality, but that's sometimes how that goes). I really couldn't believe it when I found out.
I grew up privileged and had my own space, but a shared space between siblings was normalized. But going into high school with that constraint, it seems stifling. I really have to wonder what effects that lack of privacy / autonomy has on a developing mind. There are probably studies but it's not something I'm about to research.
sharing a room forces kids to learn to get along. giving them their own room early deprives them from that experience. loud music is not going to work in many places even if you have your own room. if siblings are so incompatible that they can't bear living together than they have bigger problems than sharing a room. physical abuse among siblings points to deeper issues that are not caused by sharing a room, nor does having separate rooms fix those issues.
giving each of our kids their own room reduced our families stress level significantly. it's not 100% necessary, but i really don't think that making kids share a room helps them get along better....
Raising one child is fine, raise two or three means sharing rooms not having a guest room (e.g. relatives can't stay easily) or an at-home office space.
It's not that you can't, it's just that it's not the standard of living most western people expect.
It depends on how many kids you have, no? I did know other kids when I was growing up who shared a room with one or more siblings, but some parents want to be able to give each child their own bedroom.
So a three-bedroom apartment might not be enough if you have three kids.
This is IF you can find a 3 or 4 bedroom apartment in an American city. The job centers mostly build studios, 1 and 2 bedrooms if they build anything at all.
Or you are poor enough you get paid to pop out more kids and it's cheaper to uber twice a month to the grocery store because you have no job for which you'd need a car nor the cash to buy it.
I would also add as a car slave that the kinds of cars large enough to fit the kinds of car seats marketed in the US are tens of thousands more than a compact or mid-size sedan, and that in a mid-size sedan having a car seat in the rear-facing configuration significantly constrains how far back you can put the passenger or driver seat. This is true even for the narrower seats that are designed for three-across seating. And worse, you might not have the latch system or an appropriate kind of seat belt on that third seat.