The author cites a statistic about when students start driving, start drinking alcohol, etc. Then the author cites a statistic about "declining trust in institutions". It's easy to put a bunch of statistics like this together and imply that they indicate a lack of socialization (a common cause) or something like that, but all they really show us is a changing culture that the author (and many others) are bothered about
It's a pseudo problem (in my view) because it outlines several different (supposedly related) sub problems and then tries to tie them together as a single problem with some implicit common cause
And also this same trend of tying a bunch of seemingly-related things together without any sort of proof is unfortunately much too common in more recent, opinion-oriented journalism
The author essentially cites a bunch of unrelated (albeit interesting) statistics, talks (sighs) about "broader cultural shifts", and then on top of all of this drops this little pseudo solution at the end. A pseudo problem followed by a pseudo solution, go figure
There are too many of these bloggers (and opinion columnists) sitting around in armchairs, recycling the same gibberish they read in the Atlantic and waving their hands in the air with respect to "broader cultural shifts"
The second one of these bloggers starts "broader cultural shift"ing is the second I put their blog in the hosts file. We have too much garbage polluting the airwaves as it is, but frankly even Facebook trash is less insipid than this