> Wonder how much of this is driven by social media and the internet today. The word 'Toxic' is just thrown around now and everything is 'Toxic'.
You're spot on. The article coyly makes a mention of the real cause in this clause:
> For most of history, family relationships were based on mutual obligations rather than on mutual understanding. Parents or children might reproach the other for failing to honor/acknowledge their duty, but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible.”
Although identity has many, and positive, functions[1], here it stands for "unquestioned affirmation of one's narcissistic self-image", in other words "what I think I am, being reflected to me". Social media can do this almost perfectly, most of them are perfectly fine tuned for our engagement, what we think we are, what we would like to hear, and what we would like to get angry at (which confirms our identity through opposition).
Anything that fails at this confirmation is expelled via the magic word "toxic"[2] and parents take their share for not being able to match this self-constructed, unearned narrative of an identity.
[1] Identity is a useful narrative that explains us to ourselves and others through time and space. But it is only useful to the degree it actually conforms to the reality, else it loses its adaptivity. Which means identity needs to stem from our relationships to the world; it doesn't come from within, it does't come from without, it comes from our genuine relationship with reality as we test it. If the majority of the reality we had to conform to was internet, where we can block, downvote, silence, cancel and get recommended to by an entity that are really interested in us sticking around, our identity becomes seriously self-deceptive and not useful across time and space outside the internet. In a sense, internet replaced the narcissistic, toxic parents we were running away from, except this parent is perfectly, and callously, able to tell us what we want to hear.
[2] Toxic exists. But not everything that pisses us off, or threatens our sense of identity is toxic. Narcissistic family systems are toxic because they put their needs above the needs of the child, that includes the need of the child to hear the harsh truth at times. What I see today is some parents are switching strategies by trying to outcompete with internet in being endlessly accommodating their children and not implementing necessary but unpopular structures their children might need. They couldn't have won anyway.