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This excellent piece on age segregation has got me thinking about how serious and pervasive this problem is. As the author states:
As discussed in @2rafa's post downthread, a major issue of the fertility crisis is a lack of time. Another issue it seems is a lack of even interacting with children unless you have some yourself, or have some in your family. I wonder if the lack of time among young adults in the West is causative of this age segregation?
Regardless, it likely has its roots in the K-12 education system. It's profoundly unnatural from a cultural standpoint to only be in the same peer group as people right around your age. I'm convinced it's unhealthy, and it predisposes us in a massive way to only socialize with people close to our age.
Do you think age segregation is an issue as well? If not, why not?
I've never quite believed this kind of pat 'if you don't cuddle your baby hard enough they will definitely become a traumatized psychopath' explanation. Children these days receive a vast amount of stimulation and social engagement, far more than in premodern society, but we still have rapists and murderers among us. Not do I see how this is an increasing problem. Parents spend more time with their children than ever. And of course, the 'blame the nuclear family' trick, the latest fashion. We've been loving in nuclear families for oh, only about four hundred years now. How is this a new problem?
We've known about attachment theory for a long time and have demonstrated some of its features in animal models like monkeys. Granted true deficiency is a bit more serious than the above examples. It also may be helpful to think of the murdering/rapist case as a multi-hit model. Someone has the genetics or personality structure that renders them vulnerable to doing the fucked up shit AND then they are also raised in this way. It's more of a "most psychopaths had shitty parenting" then "most people raised with shitty parenting become psychopaths."
Note that shitty parenting likely correlates with heritable psychopathic tendencies. It's like ACEs (adverse childhood experiences). There's a ton of research showing that ACEs are correlated with had life outcomes, with the researchers and media glibly asserting causality, but if you actually look at the canonical list of ACEs, it's markers of bad parenting like "abused by parents" and "parent went to prison," not random bad luck like "raped by a stranger on the way home from school" or "injured in a serious car accident."
So there's an obvious genetic explanation that's being almost totally ignored by the people who are supposed to be the experts.
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