Why are so many children and teens today struggling with depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges, and who or what is to blame? Mind the Children provides insight into the scale, scope, and causes of the youth mental health crisis. From the decline in family life and religious affiliation to the rise in marijuana use and the ubiquity of cell phones and other screens, this book explores the cultural, institutional and technological changes that are making kids' lives more difficult.

Contributors to the book -journalists, researchers, and clinicians- address topics as varied as how schools may paradoxically worsen matters they are trying to address, how political rhetoric may affect children's ability to cope with ordinary challenges, and how to reverse the shortage of professionals available to help kids. Mind the Children will help parents and policymakers gain a comprehensive understanding of a multifaceted problem, which other experts have been too quick to trace to a single cause.

Material hardship among American children has never been lower. This seeming victory in the War on Poverty, however, has failed to loosen the connection between family origins and where kids end up. Children born to the most disadvantaged parents today are no less likely than in the past to become the most disadvantaged adults when they grow up. Indeed, because of the perverse disincentives in our safety net, policy may have simultaneously reduced hardship while impeding upward mobility. More generally, the progressive assumption that what poor children need to advance primarily involves more money is a dubious one.

But if progressive proposals to expand the opportunities of poor kids have disappointed, the challenges those children and adolescents face have never sufficiently preoccupied the right. Conservatives are appropriately skeptical of government’s ability to influence behaviors and values or to manage initiatives effectively. Their concerns about the federal government’s proper role in social policy are well-grounded. But the moral imperative to do right by kids—to affirm the American Dream—remains.

This volume provides a set of ideas to do just that. The proposals are grounded in the insight that greater opportunity requires shoring up the relationships of children and adolescents and the strength of the institutions to which they are connected—in short, rebuilding social capital. And they embrace a spirit of innovation. Expanding opportunity requires experimentation with new approaches, many of which will fail, to identify scalable effective policies. But identify them we must.

Government Project tells the story of an attempt by the US government to remake the lives of some of its citizens by establishing a cooperative farm in Pinal County, Arizona, in 1937. These individuals were among the most desperately poor and disadvantaged in the nation.

Casa Grande Valley Farms was an elaborate venture that provided the Americans who volunteered to settle there with housing, work, and the opportunity to earn income. For five years, the farm succeeded. The revenues from the sale of its crops gave the Casa Grande settlers material comfort and wealth far beyond what they had ever possessed.

But in the farm’s seventh year of operation, the inhabitants shuttered it and walked away with hardly anything, to the shock and dismay of the government officials overseeing it.

Government Project explains what went wrong at Casa Grande. In telling this story, it illuminates larger truths about human nature and the limits of governance.