More weight is given to tests and grades than ever before. Children today spend more hours per day in school than ever before. Outside school, they spend more time than ever being tutored, coached, ranked, and rewarded by adults. During the same half-century in which children’s anxiety and depression have increased, what researchers call “free play” (and most of us call goofing around) has declined, while school- and adult-directed activities such as organized sports have risen steadily in importance. In all these instances, adults are in charge, not kids or adolescents. And this, it appears,
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