There's a number of issues contributing to children and young peoples poor well-being. We don't build resilience into young people any more. The every child wins, behavior is unchallenge and aggressive parents has helped to create a lack of coping mechanism in young people. They don't know how to rhu k for themselves through the education system and are just taught to pass exams, and they succeed. At FE level, you succeed for just attempting, it doesn't even have to be correct.
When I was a child, I didn't know if my parents didn't have enough money, I didn't know if we couldn't afford food, I didn't know when they had argued. Today, young people are too involved in the decisions that really should be the responsibility of the adult. Children should be sheltered from certain issues and left to be children, worry free.
I used to teach and had a student who decided to throw their education away to work to pay their dad the maintenance money he had to give to their mum. What a disgrace on the parent, that poor young person having that worry at such a young age. Children need to be protected and nurtured, but unfortunately, parents are too soft and put too much responsibility on children.
The every child wins does not set children up to succeed through their adult life, they don't know how to lose and to cope with failure. Failure is good, it encourages people to change their behavior to succeed, but only if it's allowed to happen.
A lot 'anxiety ' or 'depression' is just a label for their feelings. Most of us have an off day, or go through periods of stressful situations, it doesn't automatically mean you have stress. We need to stop informing young people they are and teach them that it will pass, help them to manage situations instead of labeling them.
It's my guess that very few young people have genuine stress or anxiety, we all go through the same processes growing up, hopefully it's a generational trend that will soon pass.