The first is that we have not thought carefully enough about what it means to allow children to spend nearly their entire lives inhabiting a digital world in which there is no adult supervision or even interaction. Joe Parks of the National Council for Behavioral Health calls social media “a race to the bottom.”

Children are not stupid. They are extraordinarily clever and sensitive to things that adults, busy with the ordinary tasks of life and immersed in the monotony of routine, have been trained to ignore. There is a quiet despair in this country, one that has manifested itself in the lives of children and adults alike, in the increase in drug taking (death by heroin overdose among teenagers increased by 20 percent last year). Its causes are wide ranging, but surely it has something to do with the subsumption of countless facets of what used to be ordinary life into technology and the disappearance of meaningful work; it is somehow, one thinks, bound up in the social and economic anxieties of generations quietly realizing that they will be less comfortable than their parents and grandparents, with the pressures of conformity and the feeling that every mistake, from a bad score on a quiz to an ill-advised tweet or Facebook post, is inexorable.

One thing that is certain is that the private sorrows faced by children, in 2018 or any other year, are responses to a world created by adults. We can never afford to forget this.