Maybe the title is not so exact. I talk about dating today, not blaming smartphones alone. I'm talking about the new meaning of family today.

I have a female cousin that has two children with 2 different men. My brother has 3 children with 2 different women. My uncle has like 4 kids with different women. The women also had multiple kids with multiple men. Meanwhile, most men in my generation have no kids, while the women do, probably because they are dating the same guys or dating older.

Regardless, I noticed this creates a lot of tension among the families. In a sense, no families are formed... only older families attempting to unite through a relationship and then the relationship breaks, and the existing families stop speaking to each other. The complexity added to these interactions is insane. You have half-siblings with 5 grandmas, 18 uncles from 3 different families, etc. A father of one goes to Disney with his kid, and the kid's four stepbrothers start crying as hell.

So you have collections of individuals that have a lot of bastards and families that don't feel connected to them because how unbonded the families are.

I also observed that grandmas, uncles, etc. usually care less about children from divorced couples in their own families. They see them less frequently, liminal family. This is especially true for the family of the divorced father, who usually sees the kids less frequently, so they are not as important for them.

So, forget the idea of straight-up inheritance. Forget the idea of generational wealth. Forget the idea of multigenerational houses. Forget the idea of family activities with extended family. Forget the idea of community stability.

I suspect that at some point this will fix, but before that, it will have to get hell worse.