The argument in TFA makes sense at a conceptual level. Kids that aren’t allowed to play will be a neurotic mess. But I hesitate to write off teen mental health

The argument in TFA makes sense at a conceptual level. Kids that aren’t allowed to play will be a neurotic mess. But I hesitate to write off teen mental health as just a result of over parenting or social media. Those are probably contributing factors, how much is not clear to me. Another contributing factor is the economic knife hanging over everyone’s head. It’s not enough to just finish high school like it was in the 1950s. It’s not even enough to finish a bachelor’s degree now, even though only 40% of millennials have accomplished that. So just being above average isn’t enough. You need to be excellent. If you compare pretty much any other time in American history to the post-war economy, every metric is going to look worse. Does it mean we should be letting kids play tackle pom pom [1] during recess? So I’m not convinced by the hand-wavy look how great things were back in the day analysis. This analysis would be much stronger if it tried to account for confounding factors. For example analyzing countries where life expectancy is not decreasing. [1] https://www.yellowbullet.com/threads/school-yard-recess-games.1799282/ https://www.yellowbullet.com/threads/school-yard-recess-game...