Structural Infantilism as a Systemic Effect of the Breakdown of the Extended Family

Contemporary societies exhibit a paradox: unprecedented access to education, information, and cognitive tools coexists with growing difficulties in long-term life planning, relational stability, and autonomous adult functioning. This article introduces the concept of structural infantilism to explain this mismatch, arguing that the core deficit lies not in knowledge or skills, but in the erosion of intergenerationally transmitted, scenario-based experience historically embedded in extended family structures. Drawing on social psychology, anthropology, and learning theory, the extended family is conceptualized as a key social mechanism for transmitting lived knowledge through prolonged co-residence and everyday participation in adult life, rather than through formal instruction. Processes of industrialization, urbanization, and family atomization dismantled this mechanism without generating effective institutional substitutes. As a result, contemporary family systems reproduce a systemic deficit of anticipatory life competence across generations, affecting relational stability, partnership formation, and long-term family strategies. Structural infantilism is framed as a structural outcome of family transformation rather than an individual pathology, offering a theoretical contribution to family studies on intergenerational transmission, adulthood formation, and the limits of institutional compensation for lived familial experience.