Depressed kids are a symptom of a sick society and bleak outlooks. You have to try really hard to point a finger at a single culprit, but we all know that's just not the case. Sure, play is one important factor but let's consider for a moment some additional points to connect for a bleak picture:

1. We purposely build addiction into social media which leads to more screen time. Anecdotally, there are so many examples of people quitting social media and feeling much better. Screen time is a huge factor for sure.

2. We put undo stress on our kids with all of the testing requirements.I remember how much anxiety and stress I got in school just thinking about the upcoming test. Now test frequency is completely insane when compared to when I was in school. I can only imagine how much stress this is adding to a kid's day. So yeah, I think testing plays a big role in this too.

3. Kids (teens), are constantly exposed to the fear-mongering headlines bombarding them day in day out. Since we set up our media to profit from pageviews, we've created a situation where it pays to play up to people's fears. Kids read these things too and in many cases do not have the mental models or capacity to differentiate clickbait bs. vs substantive information. Hell, even adults (as witnessed by at least 50% of US population) can't differentiate between fact and fiction.

4. Lack of play time. OF COURSE kids are not going to develop properly if they can't learn to socialize and participate in society. OF COURSE they'll distance themselves back into the screen where, OOPS, they'll read more of those nasty headlines and while at it think about the upcoming test. It doesn't help that we now have (billion?)-dollar gaming companies pulling every trick in the book to build addiction into every interaction. What better way to escape the problems of the real world than to retrieve into the virtual one? I can't blame them... this is what I personally did as a teen.

5. Climate change - probably one of the most understated reasons that leaves children hopeless. While we keep debating on the best ways to solve our climate problems, kids are left hopeless about their futures. We have grown ass adults taking to Twitter to insult teens for trying to take some sort of action while those same grown ass adults are sitting on their hands or swiping their facebook feeds.

6. Increased hopelessness, depression and isolation among adults - how are kids supposed to learn to explore on their own and that there is more to life than your screen when their parents are increasingly isolating themselves from the world. When you have a government that is hellbent on making your life more difficult by fueling inequality, what possible hope do you have as a child when you see how your parents struggle to make ends meet? "oh so this is what I have to look forward to..."

You could pick apart any one of those points to trace the origins and have enough to write a Times essay. The point being, it's one massive clusterfuck with multiple points of failure. If we want our kids to have any sort of a decent and bright future full of joy, we should start looking at how to fix our own problems. Start looking at reducing inequality, proactive automation readiness, better social systems, fewer guns, policies to reduce consumption, subsidies for alternative energies and de-carbonization, complete education reform to do away with insane testing, strict laws on what can and cannot make it into consumer apps in terms of addiction building, and so on and so on.