Pretty good article. She does a lot of correlating and less establishment of causation, though.
A pastor at our church wrote a book called “The Facebook Generation”. Back in Jesus’ time people knew who they were because they were surrounded by family with little to no outside influence. So the kids were adults at the age of 12 or whatever.
1400’s or whenever - more people in cities with more influences. Adult age crept up a bit as it was a bit more difficult for to figure out “who they were”. Of course most people in the town would have the same religion and moral beliefs. But maybe they could be a butcher instead of a farmer?
With the age of the internet there are SO many outside influences that disrupt the family sphere. Even when we were raising our kids we almost always had dinner together, talked about school (and where the school was wrong in many cases), helped with homework, etc. Family outings with no phones, etc.
But society (with the internet playing a huge part imho) still has influenced our kids for the worse in some cases.
Christopher Lasch a liberal when that meant something besides the insane anti Americanism of today’s Left included this concept in his Culture of Narcissism and Revolt of the Elites. More recently Marc Dunkelmann, a liberal who sometimes appears with The Federalist also touched on this topic in The Vanishing Neighbor.