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Yes but the author of the article is specifically positing that there's been a shift in attachment styles (something I previously mostly encountered as a trait you acquire very young, like, baby to toddler years). Perhaps he is using the term differently, but he does specifically refer to "secure attachment", so he's definitely borrowing the entire set of vocabulary while he's at it. And if he isn't using the term differently, it's really strange how the article is framed around "go against your attachment style, you need to not be avoidant" and not "but why are we experiencing an epidemic of avoidant personalities?"
Again the article has singleness as a symptom of the problem, so addressing other possible causes of singleness interests me less than "if it's true people nowadays are more avoidantly attached — why?"
It could be just be part of a general tendency toward avoidant behavior and low resilience to stress. I'm sure "attachment style" is a useful handle for certain patterns of learned social behavior in intimate relationships, but getting anxious and ghosting after a mildly stressful text interaction doesn't seem meaningfully different from other kinds of maladaptive avoidance, like procrastinating studying with videogames or avoiding opening your bills.
All the literature I've read shows increasing screen use associated with impaired emotional regulation, increased irritability, anxiety and impulsivity, decreased long-term planning and persistence. Any one of those effects could handily account for people becoming less able to weather any stress in a relationship.
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Could it be daycare/preschool? Nowadays even most SAHM’s send their kids to it for some reason or other, I’m not sure why.
My understanding is that this is because studies have been done that show the early socialization outside the home is beneficial for early childhood development in some way. I don’t know the details (not yet quite old enough to be worried about kids beyond a passing interest), and frankly I’m not really convinced about the benefit of getting the kid out of the house earlier than, say, preschool age, but there definitely is some kind of developmental-based backing for why it’s become a Thing.
The ‘developmental based backing’ was something Scott went over and TLDR it was comparing preschool to low-end daycares, then(being a psychology study) it was published as showing kids do better in daycare than with their mothers.
Yeah, I’m not surprised by that. I could imagine early-childhood daycare being better than an actively abusive or neglectful mother but that’s about it, and that’s obviously not the situation under discussion here. Before preschool age the kids aren’t even really capable of socializing as such so what plausible benefit could they get from being apart from their families? But that’s what The Science said, so I guess we’ll do it… it really seems more like a fashionable choice than something strongly thought out. Something you do because the other PMC families in town are doing it.
To be fair neither of the two families I know IRL with young children do actually fit this model. One uses daycare part of the week (3 days iirc) but because the mom works part-time. The other is my cousin, whose wife has put her legal career on hold to be a SAHM while their kids are young. So it’s not like it’s totally dominant in the culture. I do find it a strange trend though, and definitely real. Common sense should be enough to tell you that a very young child would benefit from being around its family, versus being one of 10 or 20 kids overseen by essentially a cut-rate nurse, I’d think.
Over here, there are government regulations about staff-to-children ratios, and you would need more than one staff member to supervise 10-20 kids, depending on age (unless this was a really cut-rate, under the counter, unlicensed operation):
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Unlikely given that preschool has been practically universal in the Nordic countries for like three generations and this only showed up in the past 10 years or so, coincidentally at the same time smartphones really proliferated.
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