Simply K

Here’s a theory, and it isn’t borrowed. Children who don’t merge into the community around them, the real one, the majority one, not just a tight little unit of parents & siblings and one loyal cousin, don’t just struggle. Evolutionarily speaking, they go extinct (not in the literal sense, more like abandoned by their own). Call it Coexist or Co-Extinct. Look at the data, and it stops sounding like a slogan and starts sounding like an overdue diagnosis.

Full disclosure on where this comes from: I didn’t read it in a journal. I lived it, for 43 years, as the unintended field experiment of two parents from completely different backgrounds and cultures who never quite agreed on which village I was supposed to belong to. Nobody handed me a manual. I had to reverse-engineer the theory the expensive way… trial, error, and a fair bit of unnecessary isolation along the route. Consider this article the refund.

Start with the obvious: no human was ever raised by two people alone. Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy calls us “cooperative breeders”, the only great ape whose infants are handed round a whole network of caregivers, related or not.

Take the Agta of the Philippines and the BaYaka of the Congo Basin (research them yourself!), two hunter-gatherer peoples anthropologists study precisely because they still live the way most of our ancestors did. A 2024 study of both groups found people beyond the parents, unrelated campmates and teenage neighbours included, doing a large share of the hands-on childcare. Chimps don’t get this deal. Lose the mother, lose the infant. Smart humans built spares.

Jordan Peterson made roughly the same case, minus the anthropology. His claim: it is the primary duty of parents to make their children socially desirable, and by his account the window for making a child acceptable to its peers closes around age four. Blunt, but it lands uncomfortably well with the evolutionary case.

Why do parents miss that window? Rarely out of neglect. Usually the bubble gets built by default: anxiety, a move abroad, two cultures pulling in different directions (I know that one), plain exhaustion. Sometimes it’s a preference dressed up as protection. The quiet bubble feels safer than other people, and “close-knit” sounds nicer than “closed.”

That’s not devotion. That’s comfort wearing a cardigan. Whatever the reason, the child didn’t choose the bubble. They just got handed the invoice when it popped. And pop it shall

And the bubble has a signature. Siblings raised inside one tend to relax only around each other. The family unit becomes the entire known universe, comfortable precisely because it never asks anything of them.

Send them out into actual reality, a classroom, an office, a wedding full of strangers, and watch the confidence evaporate. Out of place, stiff, quietly overwhelmed by a room that isn’t required to be gentle with them. Not because the world is unusually cruel. Because they were never trained for it.

Here’s the invoice, itemised. A meta-analysis across youth gaming studies puts the pooled rate of clinical gaming disorder at 8.6%.. not casual play, actual disorder. A 2025 study of nearly 1,300 university students in Riyadh found gaming hours tracked directly with loneliness and social isolation severity.

None of this is fringe science, and none of it proves the bubble is the cause. But it maps the same slope: the smaller a child’s world, the easier it is for a screen to fill the space.

The depression numbers are worse than most parents want to know. In the US, about 18.1% of adolescents now have a major depressive episode in a given year, up from roughly 12% a decade ago. Girls sit at 25%, boys at 11%, and 40% of high schoolers report feeling persistently sad or hopeless. When we were at school, those words barely existed.

Researchers keep landing on the same suspects: heavy solo screen time, social media replacing in-person contact, and, the part parents skip past, less real-world socialising overall.

One landmark study found teens on social media more than three hours daily had roughly double the risk of depression and anxiety. The common denominator isn’t the phone. It’s what the phone replaced.

Now, a caveat, because honesty is the whole point. These trends hit almost every kid, not just the ones in bubbles. Which is exactly my worry: the same forces land harder on a child whose only cushion is two parents.

My own theory, tested closer to home: my child will grow up loved and supported by several people, not just me. I’ve watched kids raised to believe they could manage entirely on their own. Some of them are struggling now, quietly, belonging nowhere in particular. They’re not unusual. That’s the worry.

So here’s the test again, now with citations behind it.

Solo gaming till 2am, food delivered because leaving the house feels like effort, no close friends, loss of interest in hobbies, drastic sleep shifts, neglected hygiene (this is the big one!). That’s Co-Extinct, and the numbers say it’s getting more common, not less. It’s not a verdict on the kid. It’s a signal to the parent.

On the other hand, real friends, meaningful relationships, family engagements, protocol behavior, real hobbies, real conversation, a working sense of humour.. all that’s Co-Exist, and it’s still available, if we notice in time.

The excuse was always “he’ll figure it out alone.” Sometimes he does. That’s the tragedy, not the reassurance.

So start this week. One dinner with people outside the family. One club, team or class. One “yes” to an invitation your child would rather dodge. Then another.