I think awareness of the state of the world rather than it's actual state is a factor. Economically and geo-politically we're not in a vastly different state to previous decades like the 1980s, but reporting is constantly emotive and omnipresent if you let it be rather than factual reporting in 30 min news programs and reading a newspaper. Debate has been reduced to a limited number of character, lost nuance and become polarised and tribal. Most people instinctively want to be decent but fear of not being #bekind can push people into awkward stances.
There always were mental health difficulties. There were certainly plenty of eating disorders and self-harming in my cohort in the 90s at school and it's good that things aren't brushed under the carpet, but there is a lack of provision of timely support when serious issues emerge due to underfunding and working conditions.
Education has become more narrow and higher stakes. It's harder to find escape and alternative ways of skilling up since the loss off Saturday jobs. Everything is seemingly dependent on exams and from a very young age children are drilled to know how they're doing against targets. There is little chance to let children play informally and work out the world for themselves.
There's little scope for safe, low-risk failures to learn from. I cocked up my first GCSE coursework, but learned a lot about organusation and time management from it; more than I'd have learned from being scaffolded through it. Before controlled assessments were scrapped, schools couldn't take that risk and it took staff a lot of effort to guide pupils through the process. Exam leave has pretty much been scrapped with little independent study time. Target culture has a lot to answer for.
Young people are amazing, but they're being raised in a world that has shifted significantly since their parents were young. As a parent, it's hard to stand against the tide of technology, plus resisting outright carries its own harms of social isolation. Finding balance is tough I do my best to raise my children growing the skills they need to grow into well-developed adults, but I can't change social expectations, government funding and targets.
The wider trends were happening anyway, but the Covid era added mass disruption to routines, instability, withdrew support and made waiting lists back-up. It's made it harder to distinguish temporary delays from underlying issues. Having had a y4 with diagnosed learning issues, and an undiagnised y2 in 2020, it's been much harder getting the younger child's issues recognised and supported since, and he's struggled more, for longer, for the delays in diagnosis and support. He also had less secure foundations in his learning. He's young enough that he's now catching up before a critical stage of education and moving up to secondary, but it has affected all of his junior school years. For those who limped through exam years and uni, that's been much more lasting in effects academically and socially into launching into adulthood.