In her recent book Generations, psychologist Jean Twenge analyzes mental health trends over five generations, from 1925 to the present. “The way teens spend their time outside of school fundamentally changed in 2012,” Twenge writes. Since 1976, the number of times per week teens go out with friends and without their parents was constant. Suddenly, in 2010 it cratered. “It was just like a Black Diamond ski slope straight down,” Twenge told NPR. “So these really big changes occur.”

This was around the time that social media began to take off. Almost instantly, kids lost what Peggy Noonan has called “America’s playgrounds”—places to go, meet friends, fall in love, do dumb things, and find themselves.

I can attest to the value of such places. For an entire generation of kids like me who grew up in Washington, D.C., that place was Georgetown. Georgetown is mostly known to outsiders as the place of the infamous cocktail parties where elites meet, but at one time it was one of the craziest, funkiest, most beautiful places in America. If we want our kids to regain some mental health we need to enable such places to flourish once again.

[Teens already have an inclination towards self-directed focus, and moving away from that is a part of their process into maturity. The environments that Judge describes (and what I experienced at roughly the same time) forces teenagers to learn social skills that also facilitate their maturation away from narcissism. Social media blocks that process and amplifies narcissism to at least *some* degree. Otherwise well-adjusted teens will compensate, but that’s arguably a small subset. — Ed]