You titled your commentary with the word "redux"; so I'm wondering if you see yourself as having offered a theory of the origin of narcissism based on a reduced or reductionistic sociological theory of "a huge fall." Thus you wrote: "Somewhere along the line, we started disparaging self-denial and devotion to others in favor of "self-actualization". The result is that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children." The alleged "sins" of parents may indeed be visited upon children. Your position, however, seems to be that somewhere along the time line of history humankind fell from a condition of much better child care to an ostensibly much worse condition of today. The historical evidence offers not much corroboration for this romanticized view of the past. Though I certainly agree with your general outlook that things are very bad today for a great many children and that there is plenty of room for improvement in the quality of family and other human relationships, I would want to note that in general there has been no fall from a better past era. On the contrary, children are today better off in general--and we are both speaking in general--than at any time in the past. There is abundant evidence that childcare has been steadily improving with the greatest advances occurring in this very century and at an accelerating rate throughout it. There is a web site with abundant literature providing evidence for this claim at http://members.xoom.com/_XOOM/childhistory/
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