This was an incredible read. I write this while my newborn sleeps on my chest. I’m a gen-zer, and unfortunately very addicted to my phone. This is a big wake up call for me to do something about my phone addiction so it doesn’t impact my son. I try to be present, but quite frankly, I need to get rid of my iPhone (or lock it up during the day) - the temptation is just too great. Thank you. I’ll have to come back to this article later, there’s a lot to digest!
I'm with you! I was good at staying off my phone when my daughter was very little (because I'd disengaged from the online world for a period then anyway), but since joining Substack and re-engaging, I've been on my phone and laptop and in books more, and I can tell it bothers my now-toddler. It's difficult, especially if you're a bit more cerebral, which a lot of us are now, these days. My weakness is when my child is falling asleep while breastfeeding, which at varying points could take up to 45 minutes! I try to avoid reaching for my phone until her eyes are closed.
I enjoyed this and I’m glad you tagged me. I agree deeply with almost all of it.
One of the frustrating things about having young children and only concurrently realising many of the truths you list is that it’s too late to avoid repeating some of these flawed methodologies, because you don’t have the necessary alternative social infrastructure in place.
We’re trying to improve child by child. Our next step is to get a reverse osmosis filter on our tap water, and glass bottles to store it in, etc.
Hopefully by the time grandkids are on the scene we’ll be in a position to have them set up for success on all fronts by day one.
Yes, that's the most frustrating thing ... I've talked about this stuff with so many other mothers ... and almost every single one agrees with me. So many of my mom-friends have told me they wish they could quit their jobs, but it's not an option for them financially. Had a lot of conversations with other moms about how hard it is to protect your kids from the environmental toxins too, especially if you don't have a lot of free time to do research etc.
"I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one, because both survey data and my own anecdotal experience indicate that the majority of mothers of young children want to be stay-at-home parents or only work part-time; and most of those who do wish to return to full-time work wish they could take longer maternity leaves.
The issue is that they cannot afford to."
This came about in part because of a change in banking regulation that took place, IIRC, in 1974. Before then, a FDIC-insured bank (pretty much all of them) could take only one income into account in deciding whether to extend a home mortgage loan and on what terms. A second income was considered "temporary", as if the either spouse lost their job, the family's ability to service the loan was called into question.
After the change, the bank could take two incomes into account. The upshot of this change was that both spouses had to work to afford a home in a semi-decent exurban school district, because they were competing with two income families. (This is also one reason why the prices of residential housing soared in the 1970s, as there was more money became available to chase real estate.)
For those of us who are not feral cats or hedge fund billionaires, anything else was like showing up at a gunfight, armed with a Super Soaker.
This rather obscure change in regulation went almost unnoticed at the time. But it probably had more real world impact on the average frustrated American family than all the Supreme Court decisions ever handed down, all the presidential elections ever to take place, all the LGTBQXYZPDQ+ ever to draw breath.
We can argue later whether the change was a good thing or not. At this point, good luck getting that genie back into the bottle.
The banking change was a response to a new situation - taking advantage of an "opportunity". What happened here in Canada might have been quite different, but the same opportunity was here, and so the same sort of thing should be expected.
It's like an evolutionary niche. Something will fill it.
I wonder if the malady is deeper than your diagnosis. What if at the root of all these symptoms is capitalism itself, making us not need our family and local, face-to-face community, so that both of these disappear? So that even with good nutrition, no EDCs, moms who are present to their kids, you still have teens who are suffering more than ever before due to lack of face-to-face community, dads who have to work and can't be present with them, and an adult life which is, in Paul Goodman's words, absurd.
I was kind of circling this conclusion; a few years ago I might have stated it explicitly, but now I'm not entirely sure "capitalism" is the most precise word. People on the right would argue that the break-up of the family is a project more of "socialism", for example.
I think industrialization, global corporatism and profit-hungry capitalists, the rise in mobility (initially a product of the Church banning/disapproving of cousin marriages up to sixth cousins in the Early Middle Ages, and later a product of colonialism, transportation technology, and globalism), the break-up of extended families, and then the "nuclear family", increased dependence on the government etc all contribute. The shift in the Western mind toward "left hemisphere" dominant thinking, individualism, narcissism, mechanistic reductionist black and white thinking. The rise in literacy and literalism and the decline of oral traditions. The imposition of the public education system (itself a product of capitalism, as one of the original intentions was to train workers in the post-industrial era, and later to allow both parents to be in the workplace). I'm not disagreeing with your diagnosis, more concerned that "capitalism" is too vague a word.
I'm not saying socialism can't also break-up families. I want to know if capitalism does.
China does not seem to have weakened families, not sure about villages and it's pretty socialist, so data point against that, but it's irrelevant to whether capitalism breaks up families (and villages and small companies, and even integrated individuals).
industrialization seems to go hand in hand with capitalism, defined (precisely, not vaguely) as production that reduces marginal production costs, at the expense of capital costs. And the resulting need for mass production (and therefore of consumption), in order to recoup capital costs. I think the private ownership is a red herring and should not be part of the definition, especially with common stock ownership being so frequent in capitalism.
Some hunter-gatherer tribes, and gypsies were quite mobile but had strong families and tribes. So it can't be just mobility. It could be mobility out of one's familial and village bonds. But that is also facilitated by capitalism.
Increased reliance on big government does seem to be a somewhat independent factor than capitalism.
I think capitalism encourages left hemisphere thinking as well as individualism and narcissism. There is more money to be made of left-brained, individualist narcissists than right brained, communally-minded altruists. Why was there not a big upsurge in left brained thinking before the industrial revolution?
Mechanistic, black-white thinking is part of left-brained thinking, not an independent factor.
I am not sure about literacy. Seems like the greeks were pretty literate and yet had strong families and local communities (some of the philosophical schools for example were completely literate).
As you point out, education for the capitalist workplace (whether factories or offices) is a result of capitalism.
So besides what we already know, we can also see if we can test the alternative hypotheses you proposed with historical data?
Yes, sorry I didn't write the comment very clearly -- I'm aware that many of the items I listed are examples of left-brain thinking, I should have used a semi-colon after "thinking" instead of a comma.
Yes, I think "capitalism" loosely speaking breaks up the family. You sell more microwaves and collect more rent when everyone lives alone lol.
The upsurge in left-hemisphere dominance began with the invention of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation! Then started skyrocketing with Industrialization. Have you read The Master & His Emissary?
The literacy rate in Ancient Greece was maybe 15%. And reading was more of an oral activity back then, with someone reading out loud to others. Not like the post-printing press world, where quickly almost everyone became literate and it became a solo activity.
"You sell more microwaves and collect more rent when everyone lives alone lol.". That is just the consumer part of the story. The producer part is that people in the family (and village or tribe) can get their needs met from abstract systems far away (as long as they make enough money), easier than getting them from their family or village members.
I'll have to think about how to test your printing press hypothesis. One thing that comes up for me is why would the suicide rate increases, the depression and loneliness epidemics take so long after the PP was invented, to manifest? Also, what is it about literacy that would create these mental health issues?
Have not read the Master and his Emissary yet, but know some about it from other readings.
Yes ... but that's where "socialism" (in the sense that all needs should be met by government) drives the same family breakdown.
The printing press hypothesis isn't mine! Leonard Shlain, Christopher Badcock, and Iain McGilchrist all argue this, in various ways. Others too. There was chaos and violence after literacy became widespread -- Shlain documents this well in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess (he argues that literacy increases misogyny, which I think is a flawed hypothesis, but I'll get around to addressing that in an essay sometime).
The issue isn't literacy so much as excess reading as a means of communication. When people communicate in-person, they use more of their brains; but when we communicate via the written word, we aren't processing tone of voice, body language, facial expressions, "vibe" etc. This lopsides the brain toward the left hemisphere when done in excess, and many mental illnesses and personality disorders are associated with right hemisphere dysfunction. (To give a simple overview). But the mental health crisis is multifactorial. As well, the RH is better at detecting bullshit than the left hemisphere, so in theory we're more gullible when reading text than when the same ideas are communicated in person (or even over video or the phone).
A lot of kids these days communicate with their "friends" almost entirely over their phones, via text.
"Yes ... but that's where "socialism" (in the sense that all needs should be met by government) drives the same family breakdown."
Not just socialism, capitalism drives this too. Local markets don't. Capitalism is different than local markets, see my previous definition. It makes us not need each other, except in the abstract.
There may have been violence after the printing press, but wasn't there violence most of the time in the middle ages? And even if there was more violence due to the printing press, how does this relate to kids (and adults) having more mental diseases in modern times?
It makes sense that if people are reading and not interacting, they might have some mental issues due to lack of human connection. But I think (until texting came along)only a few people read that much, and there is no evidence that THOSE people are the ones with the mental problems. I agree that texting is just another example of abstract interaction between people, but again, this is a consequence of capitalism, that it makes us not need each other for goods and services, except abstractly.
To say the mental health crisis is "multifactorial" is true, but not very helpful unless we know how strong the different factors are relative to each other. I have argued that all (exception: reliance on big government) the factors you mentioned are either not strong (because changing them has no effect in some cases, or some demographics that have those factors do not show higher mental health issues), or resulting from capitalism. More convincing than argument, would be a statistical factor analysis that analyzes historical data in an unbiased way. I am not sure how to do that yet.
I suspect the REAL reason most people don't want to look at capitalism as the main culprit of our mental health crisis is the same as the guy who looks for his lost keys under the bright light instead of where he might have dropped them: it is much easier to change our food choices, or how much social media we engage in, or how we view the world, than to disengage from our addiction to capitalism and create an alternative that is not miserable. It takes some collective action, not just individual action. Or maybe it's because being anti-capitalist is associated with failed ideologies like Marxism and socialism (but my critique is neither).
Mobility is imprecise. The word you want is neolocality, the event of newlyweds moving away from their parents' location in forming their own households. Emmanuel Todd wrote at length about this.
Neolocality was originally a northwestern European thing, arising from a combination of nuclear families and the tradition of sending teens out to work as servants in other households (which were the same thing as businesses, in those days). Often the teens were sent tens of miles, which was a few day's travel. Moving away from the family to a place where employment and income prospects were better was not so difficult if you had already done it once.
The breakup of the family is a product of this habit of neolocality, urbanisation (enabled by industrial capital) and secularism. In the last several decades the decay has accelerated as young adult women increasingly left the home for paid employment, and later thanks to the internet, which could be thought of as an intensification of urbanisation.
Widespread literacy was a product of the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation). The idea took hold in the middle ages that each soul should have a direct relationship with God, not one intermediated by priests. To this end it was necessary for everyone to read the Bible, and to be catechised on it, to ensure the right messages were being instilled. For this reason even women were taught to read, so that mothers could catechise their children. David Hugh-Jones's book "Wyclif's Dust" has some more on this, although it's still only a summary of the research.
Hugh-Jones goes on to say that Puritans believed in predestination, that the Elect would go to Heaven, and others, not. They further believed that business success was a sign of election and so they focused on it.
Industrial capitalism had a great deal of its work done for it already.
Oh, thank you! I haven't come across that word before, but you're completely right. That is the one I was looking for. I'll have to look Emmanuel Todd up. And yes, agreed -- from what I've read, capitalism seems to have arisen out of the left hemisphere / individualistic tilt as much as it further drove it.
Unfortunately the great bulk of Todd's work is in French. There is an English translation of a kind of summary/synthesis work, called "Lineages of Modernity" in English. It's a mere 370 pages or so. Some of its logic seems circular but I am assuming that the reasoning is fully spelled out in his chef d'oeuvre, L'Origine des Systèmes Familiaux (The Origin of Family Systems).
Todd says he started his work after an undergrad course on family systems, after which he noticed that the geographical extent of political communism exactly matched that of a family structure called exogamous communitarianism, and wondered why.
Edit: After reading a bit of this kind of stuff I have started seeing people much less as free, autonomous agents, and much more as products of their culture.
"Notably, one essay describes a “fancy private school” in the US where of the students who had been identified as National Merit Semifinalists (tested in the 1% of Juniors who took the PSAT), 30% were trans-identified." I'm going to bet this is almost entirely "nonbinary" - the stolen valor of identities. When people panic about the rising number of trans identified people with these jaw dropping numbers, it's easy to forget blue hair and taking stereotypes too normatively now makes you trans identified. It's the substanceless "queer" that drives jaw dropping numbers.
Good post. Having a stay-at-home mother was an uncommon choice in our cohort and community. The foregone income has made us a lot poorer later in life when it is harder to accumulate cash. It was the right call nonetheless. My wife breast fed the babies. They were in bed with us as infants. Our adult children are in good shape. It is too late to re-run the movie for millions of women and children, but hopefully the future will be better, with a realistic assessment of what has happened in the last two or three generations.
I never got into the early childhood thing because my parents were honestly pretty nice. I mean, they did the best they could. They overemphasized academics because it was genuinely a bigger deal where they were from, but...no abuse, physical or sexual, and they did try to keep me away from the screens and make me well-rounded, though I had other plans.
The one thing you touch on that I noticed is the intensely grueling nature of the upper-middle-class meritocracy. (I suspect the rich just spend all their time drinking and partying.) Among other things I never had kids because I had finally reached the point where I could survive on assets until death (ie FIRE), and didn't feel like risking that with a divorce. I fall for one gold digger and then I'm set back ten years, or else working until I die to pay for an ex who despises me.
There was also the fact that the whole unclearness around exactly what constitutes sexual harassment made me afraid to date until very late, so I didn't grow up with the experience of adolescent or even 20s love--love and sex as a matter of impulse, intuition, and experimentation, rather than a fraught, dangerous undertaking with risks and benefits on par with a business deal or medical procedure, seems totally alien to me.
It's reassuring to see that others also think that early childhood experiences are a primary cause of our current malaise. Great work, Meghan! Thank you for taking the time to write this.
The financial objection to children rings hollow to me; it's a statement about priorities. When I was young, every large town in my country had a suburb nicknamed "Nappy Valley", full of small cheap, fairly shoddy homes housing new families. Yes, it's impossible to build in the West these days, but there are mobile homes. People simply prefer social status to children. People also cling to the obsolete (because disproven) blank-slate concept of child development, using it to claim that it's essential to lavish "enrichment experiences" on their children so that they will develop to their potential. The best enrichment is plenty of time with one or both parents, from birth to at least the teen years.
Thanks for this, popped up on Substack and really appreciate the insight and sharing your own personal story - can’t be easy, the experience itself and then making it available! So many causes of so much sadness, at least someone is looking out for them. I think Mary Eberstadt’s Primal Screams drew attention to the impact of modern childcare on long term trends. I think as well (Jordan Peterson talks about this) we have fewer children later in life when we as parents are more prosperous, settled and cautious. Our best memories are of being young(ish) parents and muddling along and working things out along the way.
Excellent essay with so many strands worthy of their own exploration!
I'm reminded of my thoughts after reading Melissa Febos' book Girlhood:
Perhaps my longing to be a popular girl was birthed and thwarted when I was a late bloomer and that maybe the social stratification of middle and high school girls is destiny based on the timetables of puberty (sort of like Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers where professional hockey players are mostly born in the first 3 months of the year, giving them a leg up and opportunities not afforded to the late-in-the-year birthdays) Because Febos' book made me think of something I never have: How do shy 11 and 12 year olds, with no agency to speak of, or peers, or role models, handle being the 'experimental' firsts down the puberty pathway? How do they escape the eyes and clutches of older boys when they present as 16 year olds? What to do with the acquiescent nature of girls when the very act of acquiescence in young womanhood marks you as easy, as a slut?
You have brought up such a multitude of issues in this essay that it's hard to respond here. I'm just here to say that I'm completely weirded out by the fact that you look EXACTLY like me circa age 3 or 4 in that elephant pic. Precise exact same haircut, same face, you look like my 4 year old twin. Spooky.
The anti-natalism of modern feminism is going to be its eventual downfall. The fact of the matter is that political beliefs are 70% heritable and healthy men absolutely despise feminist doctrine at this point. The only type of next-generation that feminism will have will consist of extremely mentally ill individuals... slowly they will have their bony old fingers wedged off of the levers of power one way or another. The mentally ill and incompetent don't make a good generation of leaders and strong men are going to do their best to crush feminism back down into a footnote in history... to the applause of their wives and families.
This was an incredible read. I write this while my newborn sleeps on my chest. I’m a gen-zer, and unfortunately very addicted to my phone. This is a big wake up call for me to do something about my phone addiction so it doesn’t impact my son. I try to be present, but quite frankly, I need to get rid of my iPhone (or lock it up during the day) - the temptation is just too great. Thank you. I’ll have to come back to this article later, there’s a lot to digest!
I'm with you! I was good at staying off my phone when my daughter was very little (because I'd disengaged from the online world for a period then anyway), but since joining Substack and re-engaging, I've been on my phone and laptop and in books more, and I can tell it bothers my now-toddler. It's difficult, especially if you're a bit more cerebral, which a lot of us are now, these days. My weakness is when my child is falling asleep while breastfeeding, which at varying points could take up to 45 minutes! I try to avoid reaching for my phone until her eyes are closed.
I enjoyed this and I’m glad you tagged me. I agree deeply with almost all of it.
One of the frustrating things about having young children and only concurrently realising many of the truths you list is that it’s too late to avoid repeating some of these flawed methodologies, because you don’t have the necessary alternative social infrastructure in place.
We’re trying to improve child by child. Our next step is to get a reverse osmosis filter on our tap water, and glass bottles to store it in, etc.
Hopefully by the time grandkids are on the scene we’ll be in a position to have them set up for success on all fronts by day one.
Yes, that's the most frustrating thing ... I've talked about this stuff with so many other mothers ... and almost every single one agrees with me. So many of my mom-friends have told me they wish they could quit their jobs, but it's not an option for them financially. Had a lot of conversations with other moms about how hard it is to protect your kids from the environmental toxins too, especially if you don't have a lot of free time to do research etc.
"I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one, because both survey data and my own anecdotal experience indicate that the majority of mothers of young children want to be stay-at-home parents or only work part-time; and most of those who do wish to return to full-time work wish they could take longer maternity leaves.
The issue is that they cannot afford to."
This came about in part because of a change in banking regulation that took place, IIRC, in 1974. Before then, a FDIC-insured bank (pretty much all of them) could take only one income into account in deciding whether to extend a home mortgage loan and on what terms. A second income was considered "temporary", as if the either spouse lost their job, the family's ability to service the loan was called into question.
After the change, the bank could take two incomes into account. The upshot of this change was that both spouses had to work to afford a home in a semi-decent exurban school district, because they were competing with two income families. (This is also one reason why the prices of residential housing soared in the 1970s, as there was more money became available to chase real estate.)
For those of us who are not feral cats or hedge fund billionaires, anything else was like showing up at a gunfight, armed with a Super Soaker.
This rather obscure change in regulation went almost unnoticed at the time. But it probably had more real world impact on the average frustrated American family than all the Supreme Court decisions ever handed down, all the presidential elections ever to take place, all the LGTBQXYZPDQ+ ever to draw breath.
We can argue later whether the change was a good thing or not. At this point, good luck getting that genie back into the bottle.
The Two-Income Trap, the book Elizabeth Warren would like to forget she (and her daughter) wrote? ;)
IIRC, that also is the book that made Elizabeth Warren.
Interesting, I wasn't familiar with this history. I'm in Canada and so are the anecdotes in this essay -- did something similar happen here?
No idea.
The banking change was a response to a new situation - taking advantage of an "opportunity". What happened here in Canada might have been quite different, but the same opportunity was here, and so the same sort of thing should be expected.
It's like an evolutionary niche. Something will fill it.
I wonder if the malady is deeper than your diagnosis. What if at the root of all these symptoms is capitalism itself, making us not need our family and local, face-to-face community, so that both of these disappear? So that even with good nutrition, no EDCs, moms who are present to their kids, you still have teens who are suffering more than ever before due to lack of face-to-face community, dads who have to work and can't be present with them, and an adult life which is, in Paul Goodman's words, absurd.
I was kind of circling this conclusion; a few years ago I might have stated it explicitly, but now I'm not entirely sure "capitalism" is the most precise word. People on the right would argue that the break-up of the family is a project more of "socialism", for example.
I think industrialization, global corporatism and profit-hungry capitalists, the rise in mobility (initially a product of the Church banning/disapproving of cousin marriages up to sixth cousins in the Early Middle Ages, and later a product of colonialism, transportation technology, and globalism), the break-up of extended families, and then the "nuclear family", increased dependence on the government etc all contribute. The shift in the Western mind toward "left hemisphere" dominant thinking, individualism, narcissism, mechanistic reductionist black and white thinking. The rise in literacy and literalism and the decline of oral traditions. The imposition of the public education system (itself a product of capitalism, as one of the original intentions was to train workers in the post-industrial era, and later to allow both parents to be in the workplace). I'm not disagreeing with your diagnosis, more concerned that "capitalism" is too vague a word.
I'm not saying socialism can't also break-up families. I want to know if capitalism does.
China does not seem to have weakened families, not sure about villages and it's pretty socialist, so data point against that, but it's irrelevant to whether capitalism breaks up families (and villages and small companies, and even integrated individuals).
industrialization seems to go hand in hand with capitalism, defined (precisely, not vaguely) as production that reduces marginal production costs, at the expense of capital costs. And the resulting need for mass production (and therefore of consumption), in order to recoup capital costs. I think the private ownership is a red herring and should not be part of the definition, especially with common stock ownership being so frequent in capitalism.
Some hunter-gatherer tribes, and gypsies were quite mobile but had strong families and tribes. So it can't be just mobility. It could be mobility out of one's familial and village bonds. But that is also facilitated by capitalism.
Increased reliance on big government does seem to be a somewhat independent factor than capitalism.
I think capitalism encourages left hemisphere thinking as well as individualism and narcissism. There is more money to be made of left-brained, individualist narcissists than right brained, communally-minded altruists. Why was there not a big upsurge in left brained thinking before the industrial revolution?
Mechanistic, black-white thinking is part of left-brained thinking, not an independent factor.
I am not sure about literacy. Seems like the greeks were pretty literate and yet had strong families and local communities (some of the philosophical schools for example were completely literate).
As you point out, education for the capitalist workplace (whether factories or offices) is a result of capitalism.
So besides what we already know, we can also see if we can test the alternative hypotheses you proposed with historical data?
Yes, sorry I didn't write the comment very clearly -- I'm aware that many of the items I listed are examples of left-brain thinking, I should have used a semi-colon after "thinking" instead of a comma.
Yes, I think "capitalism" loosely speaking breaks up the family. You sell more microwaves and collect more rent when everyone lives alone lol.
The upsurge in left-hemisphere dominance began with the invention of the printing press and the Protestant Reformation! Then started skyrocketing with Industrialization. Have you read The Master & His Emissary?
The literacy rate in Ancient Greece was maybe 15%. And reading was more of an oral activity back then, with someone reading out loud to others. Not like the post-printing press world, where quickly almost everyone became literate and it became a solo activity.
I have an essay about this here:
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-dangers-of-reading-too-much-part
"You sell more microwaves and collect more rent when everyone lives alone lol.". That is just the consumer part of the story. The producer part is that people in the family (and village or tribe) can get their needs met from abstract systems far away (as long as they make enough money), easier than getting them from their family or village members.
I'll have to think about how to test your printing press hypothesis. One thing that comes up for me is why would the suicide rate increases, the depression and loneliness epidemics take so long after the PP was invented, to manifest? Also, what is it about literacy that would create these mental health issues?
Have not read the Master and his Emissary yet, but know some about it from other readings.
Yes ... but that's where "socialism" (in the sense that all needs should be met by government) drives the same family breakdown.
The printing press hypothesis isn't mine! Leonard Shlain, Christopher Badcock, and Iain McGilchrist all argue this, in various ways. Others too. There was chaos and violence after literacy became widespread -- Shlain documents this well in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess (he argues that literacy increases misogyny, which I think is a flawed hypothesis, but I'll get around to addressing that in an essay sometime).
The issue isn't literacy so much as excess reading as a means of communication. When people communicate in-person, they use more of their brains; but when we communicate via the written word, we aren't processing tone of voice, body language, facial expressions, "vibe" etc. This lopsides the brain toward the left hemisphere when done in excess, and many mental illnesses and personality disorders are associated with right hemisphere dysfunction. (To give a simple overview). But the mental health crisis is multifactorial. As well, the RH is better at detecting bullshit than the left hemisphere, so in theory we're more gullible when reading text than when the same ideas are communicated in person (or even over video or the phone).
A lot of kids these days communicate with their "friends" almost entirely over their phones, via text.
"Yes ... but that's where "socialism" (in the sense that all needs should be met by government) drives the same family breakdown."
Not just socialism, capitalism drives this too. Local markets don't. Capitalism is different than local markets, see my previous definition. It makes us not need each other, except in the abstract.
There may have been violence after the printing press, but wasn't there violence most of the time in the middle ages? And even if there was more violence due to the printing press, how does this relate to kids (and adults) having more mental diseases in modern times?
It makes sense that if people are reading and not interacting, they might have some mental issues due to lack of human connection. But I think (until texting came along)only a few people read that much, and there is no evidence that THOSE people are the ones with the mental problems. I agree that texting is just another example of abstract interaction between people, but again, this is a consequence of capitalism, that it makes us not need each other for goods and services, except abstractly.
To say the mental health crisis is "multifactorial" is true, but not very helpful unless we know how strong the different factors are relative to each other. I have argued that all (exception: reliance on big government) the factors you mentioned are either not strong (because changing them has no effect in some cases, or some demographics that have those factors do not show higher mental health issues), or resulting from capitalism. More convincing than argument, would be a statistical factor analysis that analyzes historical data in an unbiased way. I am not sure how to do that yet.
I suspect the REAL reason most people don't want to look at capitalism as the main culprit of our mental health crisis is the same as the guy who looks for his lost keys under the bright light instead of where he might have dropped them: it is much easier to change our food choices, or how much social media we engage in, or how we view the world, than to disengage from our addiction to capitalism and create an alternative that is not miserable. It takes some collective action, not just individual action. Or maybe it's because being anti-capitalist is associated with failed ideologies like Marxism and socialism (but my critique is neither).
There’s a very long and excellent article germinating there.
Mobility is imprecise. The word you want is neolocality, the event of newlyweds moving away from their parents' location in forming their own households. Emmanuel Todd wrote at length about this.
Neolocality was originally a northwestern European thing, arising from a combination of nuclear families and the tradition of sending teens out to work as servants in other households (which were the same thing as businesses, in those days). Often the teens were sent tens of miles, which was a few day's travel. Moving away from the family to a place where employment and income prospects were better was not so difficult if you had already done it once.
The breakup of the family is a product of this habit of neolocality, urbanisation (enabled by industrial capital) and secularism. In the last several decades the decay has accelerated as young adult women increasingly left the home for paid employment, and later thanks to the internet, which could be thought of as an intensification of urbanisation.
Widespread literacy was a product of the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation). The idea took hold in the middle ages that each soul should have a direct relationship with God, not one intermediated by priests. To this end it was necessary for everyone to read the Bible, and to be catechised on it, to ensure the right messages were being instilled. For this reason even women were taught to read, so that mothers could catechise their children. David Hugh-Jones's book "Wyclif's Dust" has some more on this, although it's still only a summary of the research.
Hugh-Jones goes on to say that Puritans believed in predestination, that the Elect would go to Heaven, and others, not. They further believed that business success was a sign of election and so they focused on it.
Industrial capitalism had a great deal of its work done for it already.
Oh, thank you! I haven't come across that word before, but you're completely right. That is the one I was looking for. I'll have to look Emmanuel Todd up. And yes, agreed -- from what I've read, capitalism seems to have arisen out of the left hemisphere / individualistic tilt as much as it further drove it.
Unfortunately the great bulk of Todd's work is in French. There is an English translation of a kind of summary/synthesis work, called "Lineages of Modernity" in English. It's a mere 370 pages or so. Some of its logic seems circular but I am assuming that the reasoning is fully spelled out in his chef d'oeuvre, L'Origine des Systèmes Familiaux (The Origin of Family Systems).
Todd says he started his work after an undergrad course on family systems, after which he noticed that the geographical extent of political communism exactly matched that of a family structure called exogamous communitarianism, and wondered why.
Edit: After reading a bit of this kind of stuff I have started seeing people much less as free, autonomous agents, and much more as products of their culture.
"Notably, one essay describes a “fancy private school” in the US where of the students who had been identified as National Merit Semifinalists (tested in the 1% of Juniors who took the PSAT), 30% were trans-identified." I'm going to bet this is almost entirely "nonbinary" - the stolen valor of identities. When people panic about the rising number of trans identified people with these jaw dropping numbers, it's easy to forget blue hair and taking stereotypes too normatively now makes you trans identified. It's the substanceless "queer" that drives jaw dropping numbers.
The article doesn't specify, but I suspect you're right. There's several reasons why kids who are more academically "gifted" are inclined toward various "trans" identities. I got more into that in this essay: https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-drama-of-the-gifted-children
Not to mention one gains Wokemon points for the bitterly competitive college admissions race by calling yourself "nonbinary" or "queer" or whatever.
And about a third of white college applicants now lie or exaggerate about their racial identity too :-/
Weird. I've never known a cat to lie about her pedigree, nor would any cat have a reason to do so.
Good post. Having a stay-at-home mother was an uncommon choice in our cohort and community. The foregone income has made us a lot poorer later in life when it is harder to accumulate cash. It was the right call nonetheless. My wife breast fed the babies. They were in bed with us as infants. Our adult children are in good shape. It is too late to re-run the movie for millions of women and children, but hopefully the future will be better, with a realistic assessment of what has happened in the last two or three generations.
I never got into the early childhood thing because my parents were honestly pretty nice. I mean, they did the best they could. They overemphasized academics because it was genuinely a bigger deal where they were from, but...no abuse, physical or sexual, and they did try to keep me away from the screens and make me well-rounded, though I had other plans.
The one thing you touch on that I noticed is the intensely grueling nature of the upper-middle-class meritocracy. (I suspect the rich just spend all their time drinking and partying.) Among other things I never had kids because I had finally reached the point where I could survive on assets until death (ie FIRE), and didn't feel like risking that with a divorce. I fall for one gold digger and then I'm set back ten years, or else working until I die to pay for an ex who despises me.
There was also the fact that the whole unclearness around exactly what constitutes sexual harassment made me afraid to date until very late, so I didn't grow up with the experience of adolescent or even 20s love--love and sex as a matter of impulse, intuition, and experimentation, rather than a fraught, dangerous undertaking with risks and benefits on par with a business deal or medical procedure, seems totally alien to me.
This was incredibly thought provoking, thanks
It's reassuring to see that others also think that early childhood experiences are a primary cause of our current malaise. Great work, Meghan! Thank you for taking the time to write this.
The financial objection to children rings hollow to me; it's a statement about priorities. When I was young, every large town in my country had a suburb nicknamed "Nappy Valley", full of small cheap, fairly shoddy homes housing new families. Yes, it's impossible to build in the West these days, but there are mobile homes. People simply prefer social status to children. People also cling to the obsolete (because disproven) blank-slate concept of child development, using it to claim that it's essential to lavish "enrichment experiences" on their children so that they will develop to their potential. The best enrichment is plenty of time with one or both parents, from birth to at least the teen years.
Thanks for this, popped up on Substack and really appreciate the insight and sharing your own personal story - can’t be easy, the experience itself and then making it available! So many causes of so much sadness, at least someone is looking out for them. I think Mary Eberstadt’s Primal Screams drew attention to the impact of modern childcare on long term trends. I think as well (Jordan Peterson talks about this) we have fewer children later in life when we as parents are more prosperous, settled and cautious. Our best memories are of being young(ish) parents and muddling along and working things out along the way.
Excellent essay with so many strands worthy of their own exploration!
I'm reminded of my thoughts after reading Melissa Febos' book Girlhood:
Perhaps my longing to be a popular girl was birthed and thwarted when I was a late bloomer and that maybe the social stratification of middle and high school girls is destiny based on the timetables of puberty (sort of like Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers where professional hockey players are mostly born in the first 3 months of the year, giving them a leg up and opportunities not afforded to the late-in-the-year birthdays) Because Febos' book made me think of something I never have: How do shy 11 and 12 year olds, with no agency to speak of, or peers, or role models, handle being the 'experimental' firsts down the puberty pathway? How do they escape the eyes and clutches of older boys when they present as 16 year olds? What to do with the acquiescent nature of girls when the very act of acquiescence in young womanhood marks you as easy, as a slut?
This was deeply moving.
You have brought up such a multitude of issues in this essay that it's hard to respond here. I'm just here to say that I'm completely weirded out by the fact that you look EXACTLY like me circa age 3 or 4 in that elephant pic. Precise exact same haircut, same face, you look like my 4 year old twin. Spooky.
Oh no, the bangs!
Very interesting and insightful article.
The anti-natalism of modern feminism is going to be its eventual downfall. The fact of the matter is that political beliefs are 70% heritable and healthy men absolutely despise feminist doctrine at this point. The only type of next-generation that feminism will have will consist of extremely mentally ill individuals... slowly they will have their bony old fingers wedged off of the levers of power one way or another. The mentally ill and incompetent don't make a good generation of leaders and strong men are going to do their best to crush feminism back down into a footnote in history... to the applause of their wives and families.
Isn't that exactly what is described in Revelation?