These last nine years, I have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on the road traveling to middle schools and high schools all across New England.

I have spoken to kids in countless gyms and auditoriums about mental health awareness. I have been to prestigious private schools and less privileged ones, too, where the kids somehow make do with less but still succeed.

It has been an unusual gift for someone of my age to get to know this generation. They are pretty extraordinary if you ask me. They’re smarter than I was, more worldly wise than I remember being and they are more accepting of differences than any prior generation of Americans. They have also enjoyed many advantages that I may have missed, but I benefitted from a childhood that many of them will never have the good fortune to remember.

I grew up in a loving, middle-class family in a town of 20,000 people. By any standard, I had an over-protective mother who constantly sacrificed for our family and a father who was a role model of decency and character in ways that made it seem effortless. They were always present to my sister and me. Home was our safe, private space.

Of all the great things my parents did for me and my sister, the most valuable, looking back, was letting us have real childhoods. You remember those. They were never dress rehearsals for adulthood. We felt supported but never managed or micromanaged. Unstructured time was the joy of childhood and the foundation for curiosity and growing self-awareness. It allowed us to figure out who we were, what interested us and allowed us to begin to think about what we might do or become. We experienced small successes and small failures. Both were equally important for us, even if we didn’t know it then.

I played endlessly in the neighborhood; I went fishing for hours with friends at the lake in our town on warm summer afternoons; I played tennis in the park a mile from our house and enjoyed endless pick-up baseball and basketball games with friends when I wasn’t caddying at the local golf course. I walked or rode my bike everywhere.

iPhones didn’t exist. Supervision had a looser grip, and independence came much earlier. So did emotional growth, solving problems, taking responsibility and being accountable. Boredom, when it struck, was my problem to solve, not my parents.

What happened to those days and the incredible opportunities they gave us when we were kids? Sadly, they now seem too unstructured, too uncertain, too casual, too dangerous and too uncompetitive by today’s standards.

From the kids who’ve confided in me in those many gyms and auditoriums, I’ve regrettably learned that singular focus on achievement, success, GPA, class rank and extracurricular activities is king of the hill in their world while the inefficient use of time, so important to personal growth and quiet confidence, is seen as wasted time. Organized sports and travel teams and the crazy family schedules of driving and fast foods they demand have replaced family dinners and comforting nights at home.

We are shortchanging childhood, and the price we are paying is way too high. It is not surprising to me that stress, anxiety and depression are epidemic in kids today. But while the kids may have these problems, the kids are not the problem.

We could address it if we wanted, but that would mean we would need to chase fewer rabbits, stop long enough to reflect on what’s happening to the mental health of “our kids” and then have the resolve to make changes. Only when we begin to talk about it openly and honestly will we finally address what’s ailing too many of today’s kids — and the parents who love them.

John T. Broderick, Jr. is the former Senior Director of External Affairs at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and formerly served as Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court.