[lutorm]

I agree with you on many of these things, and certainly the isolation and lack of freedom for children in the US these days seems like a very bleak existence compared to how I grew up in Sweden.

But these things seem kind of orthogonal to the OP's argument. Holding all those things constant (since it's a systemic problem with American society that's not easy to change for an individual) do you really think a child whose parents work all the time is better off than one whose parents spend some time with them? (Especially when they are very young, which seems to be the case with the OP.) I don't have any hard statistics about this, but my impression is that there are far more kids in the US whose parents work all the time than have parents that neglect their jobs for their children.