[lisa_henderson]

Anyone who has been China can tell you this is wrong:

"With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world."

Affluent kids in China are also very much indulged, mostly by grandparents.

The main factor at work here is not a mystery: the demographic transition that began in the West around 1850. When families have 20 children, the children are under pressure to prove their worth to the family, relative to all the other children. They compete with each other to show their worth. But when a family only has one child, the parents and grandparents compete to win the favor of the child.

There are nuances, that vary from country to country, but the primary force at work here is the demographic transition.

[Kristine1975]

>the children are under pressure to prove their worth to the family

This sounds like a really dysfunctional family to me.

[lisa_henderson]

When there is no food, the parents need to decide which children will die. This is true in all species. This is what leads to the emergence of specific neotenic traits that in the context of humans we regard as "cute" or "adorable" or, in a more sinister context, "superior". Consider skin color as an influence on parental investment:

https://books.google.com/books?id=LSCf0j5lNeYC&pg=PA142&lpg=...

Also, fitness and kinship:

https://books.google.com/books?id=2XH0CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA113&lpg=...

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

Let's suppose for a moment that this is true. In that case, as a human behavior, we should be able to find such acts described in the historical record and in particular in literature.

Can you name three such examples?

[lisa_henderson]

Are you joking? Every human society had ways of killing off their children, mostly the daughters since they are regarded as less valuable than sons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide

"In many past societies, certain forms of infanticide were considered permissible. In some countries, female infanticide is more common than the killing of male offspring, due to sex-selective infanticide.[3] In China for example, the gender gap between males and females aged 0–19 year old was estimated to be 25 million in 2010 by the United Nations Population Fund."

Also:

"The historical Greeks considered the practice of adult and child sacrifice barbarous,[30] however, the exposure of newborns was widely practiced in ancient Greece, it was even advocated by Aristotle in the case of congenital deformity "

In her Nobel winning novel, The Good Earth, Pearl Buck recounts how the family, during a famine, allows the daughter to starve to death, but then at the last moment the father changes his mind and gives her some food. The child grows up brain damaged, having been deprived of food for several days, when she was only 1 or 2 years old. This part of the novel (like everything else in the novel) has been praised for its realism.

Around the year 610, early in his preaching, one of Muhammad's first revelations from Allah is that parents should no longer leave their newborn daughters to die in the desert. He would not have felt the need to make this pronouncement unless it was a common practice. And remember that his own sister had been set out in the desert and allowed to die as soon as she was born.

[TheLilHipster]

Define a "functional" family.

Define what makes a social dynamic "dysfunctional".

  > humans are under pressure to prove their worth to society.

  This sounds like a really dysfunctional society to me.[sic]

I'll have to disagree with you there kristine.

Lisa makes a lot of sense - even then, it's still only a piece of a massive social jigsaw mindfuck.