Tcobb, I think you’ve been dead on, and I hate to say this, but Maineman, I think you are missing the point completely.
Your example of “attachment theory” is a perfect example of the rot in modern mainstream thinking. Of course many, many children are being raised badly today – but the idea of “attachment theory” is simple the fancy word we use to try to reteach ourselves the knowledge that all previous generations have known and which we, in our arrogance, threw away as too “old fashioned”.
How do you raise children so that they turn out well? Of course many children are as resilient as weeds and thrive even in poor soil, but generally the best results come when there is a family unit with two parents, one male, one female, (the influence of BOTH genders is very important!) both committed to the child, who work to involve the child in their daily lives, who constantly strive to teach them their values, to integrate them in to their parents society, to help them find a place in the world, and to always make sure that they know that they are loved and wanted.
Successful parents in the 19th century knew this, as they did in the 15th century, as they did in the first century, and I would hazard a guess that it was already known at the time the last Ice Age ended. No one needed a fancy word like “attachment theory” to tell them this; it was simply the obvious way the world worked. But we, in our arrogance, have decided to throw away all the common knowledge of previous generations and now we have to come up with scholarly papers presided over by circles of PhD’s to tell us what the poorest, most uneducated peasant took for granted centuries ago.
Of course don’t take this to mean that there weren’t poor parents then – people living their lives stupidly is a constant of the human condition, and that certainly applies to raising children. But all of us here today are almost certainly the descendants of those who Got It Right, for the simple reason that those who consistently get it wrong tend to burn out their lineage fairly quickly.
This is the category error: “statistics”, when applied to social issues, is just our cultures inferior substitute for the applied common knowledge of the previous 500 generations of humanity. And that’s when our modern mages get it right – when they get it wrong it is nothing but dangerous and destructive nonsense that we would all be better off without.
