LET THE KIDS BE KIDS.

Arnold Kling offers a candidate for a Short Take.  "For teenagers, 18 is the new 14."  Unfortunately, an even-more-extended adolescence leads to maladjusted adults.  "Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults."

There are several phenomena at work. Why are kindergartners being assigned homework?  Then come the helicopter parents.  There's more to that than running the kids to school because the subdivision isn't walkable.  "[E]xperts agree that taking a well-timed step back and letting your child make their [c.q.] own decisions (and yes, mistakes) ultimately helps them [c.q.] become a more confident, successful, and resilient adult later in life."  What would we ever do without experts?

Remember yesterday's lament about musical parents living vicariously through their spawn?  It's wrecking youth sports.

I sat in the stands of the soccer stadium. And I seethed.

My assignment — in 1997, as a new reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel — was to cover a high school girls soccer game between Whitefish Bay and Shorewood. And I could barely concentrate on what was happening on the field because of a couple of idiots in front of me in the stands.

I couldn’t believe it. These were “adults,” presumably parents, shouting degrading insults to the opposing team’s teenage players, and screaming obscenities at the referees. They cussed and screamed, not once, not a few times, but for the entirety of the game.

Reporter Lori Nickel's verdict? "Youth sports, I decided, was rife with clueless parents who, at best, didn’t understand the game they never played themselves, or, at worst, lived their uneventful lives vicariously through their children." Later, after she became a soccer mom, she stumbled on another part of the problem.

Look. I’ve messed up. I’ve failed, too. I’ve said too much on those drives home from games and practices. I've criticized and second-guessed. After investing thousands of dollars in my kids' sports, and untold hours of driving them to practices and games, organizing my life around the youth sports schedule, it takes herculean restraint to hug a child or high-five a teen and just say, “good job,” win or lose. And to say, “respect your coaches and don’t talk back to officials.”

But my goodness, can we hold up a mirror to our histrionics – and see what our kids see, and listen to what our kids hear, and understand?

That pediatric report came up on Milwaukee radio this morning, and the newscasters hit on another source of the mental distress.  Unless Mrs Nickel put her kids in sports camp, they probably have little chance of making the varsity come high school, or so the newscasters suggested.  Those eight year olds who fancy themselves the next Mia Hamm or Carli Lloyd or Alex Morgan?  Without a few summers in sports camp, they're behind on the learning curve, and, those newscasters lamented, the kids who make varsity are the ones who learned to play together at those camps, and on the organized youth teams, and the youngster who gets to high school and starts thinking about those extracurriculars (that calls attention to another foolishness, this record-enhancing-with-extracurriculars-to-impress-colleges nonsense) and thinks it might be fun to go out for soccer or volleyball will be sod out of luck.  So, too, might it be with those aspiring musicians.  If a school has a good band or orchestra, how many of the players might have started with Suzuki or been to camp at Interlochen (it's easier to get into Harvard??) or Tanglewood?  So much for spontaneous play.  Instead of riding your bike around the neighborhood knocking on doors, the parents organize the play dates.  Instead of organizing a sandlot game, it's organized practice and camp and the under-ten leagues.  Instead of the garage band, it's music camp.  Enough.  "Historians' interpretations, with 100 years' hindsight, of the messages youngsters are getting about the importance of things, will make for interesting reading, that is, if anyone will be capable of reading anything."

Speaking of experts, the American Psychological Association's boffins are aware the kids are having problems.  Their response, though, is tone deaf.

All children have the right to happy and healthy lives and deserve access to effective care to prevent or treat any mental health problems that they may develop. However, there is a tremendous amount of unmet need, and health disparities are particularly pronounced for children living in low-income communities, ethnic minority children, and oppressed populations such as those defined by gender identity and sexual orientation; immigration status; physical, developmental, and intellectual disabilities; or chronic medical conditions.

I'd like to know who provides that right, and whether the high-status parents who don't figure in that passage labor under the misapprehension that stressing over Harvard Prep Day Care or learning the multiplication tables in kindergarten or developing a curve ball in third grade is laying the foundation for those happy and healthy lives.