My partner is a therapist and so I wind up in a lot of therapist groups and support groups for therapists. Many of them are youth therapists. I also coach kids and help coordinate youth athletics. My best friend is also a middle school teacher, along with his partner. So I think I have a decent grasp on where kids are at nowadays. At least in my area.

Most people I know who work with kids agree that the majority of children nowadays lack basic skills that will really handicap them in life. From a lack of basic reading/writing/typing/math skills to an ability to handle any kind of confrontation. The anti-social stuff is really, really bad and it compounds as life goes on, where kids never learn skills as they need to. Avoidance is really prevalent in people nowadays and this leads to never learning or atrophying basic skill sets. Then it also leads to not learning how to learn, or asking for help, etc.

Kids also lack the basic ability to put a series of tasks together to accomplish a larger goal. Critical thinking is severely lacking. Kids have grown up being able to ask a search engine a question or have an AI do tasks for them. The ability to understand how things work, then manipulate those things to meet a goal is just not there for a large amount of kids. I think we really need to bring back things like shop class, home ec, etc to get kids using their hands more. Kids need to be able to have an idea and then implement it in the real world. This is a skill I rarely see in kids nowadays. Way too often kids are told to avoid making mistakes and to get someone/something else to do things for them. The agency is just not there.

I really feel terrible for a lot of kids nowadays. Luckily, since I work with athletics and STEM kids, most of my tribe are eager to learn and move about. This is definitely not the norm nowadays though. My teacher friends are really struggling to feel like they're making a difference or benefitting these kids. It's sad because the problems are mostly related to their parents, not really the school system.