For whats its worth my tuppence worth. To qualify my personal background is being brought up as a family of 6, 2 adopted siblings, mother was stay at home, father was a lecturer, attended only normal schools. I am now a father of four kids and my wife is a stay at home mum.
To my mind this situation has arisen through a number of factors:
1) lack of appropriate education
2) lack of social morals / acceptable framework
3) lack of responsibilty and understanding of consequence
4) lack of shame
In relation to the lack of appropriate education, I use the term appropriate deliberately, this has been due in the main by poor Labour government decisions. When I was at school I believe I was the last generation to get what I would call a good balanced education - this was both academic subjects (maths, english, french, physics, chemistry etc) and vocational subjects (home economics, craft and design, art etc). This balance of subjects provided for all groups of children, those who were naturally academic and those who were not so inclined. For those who lacked a natural ability they could still achieve through these vocational subjects and gain a sense of achievement. Labours insistence that everyone will be academic and 50% of kids would go to university resulted in those who were not natually academic feeling that they were worthless.
Again when I was younger I had multiple sources to help me develop a moral / ethical framework. I had strong loving parents, I had an extended family who had grown up in hard times and we attended church. Although I appreciate many people on here have no interest in organised religion what it helped to provide was a framework of acceptable standards. I am all for people having the freedom to move away from religion, however I feel far too many people in society moved away from religion but never replaced that source of moral framework with anything else.
Lack of responsibity or, possibly more accurately, "I deserve everything" culture. From both government and the media we have been bombarded with a focus on children should be entighteled to get anything they want and that society has no right to discipline them. From stories of people being prosecuted for smacking their children to teachers being banned for trying to control their classrooms. This constant reinforcement gave children a sense of power and freedom, without providing them with the tools to understand the responsibility that goes with this. I grew up not fearing my parents, policemen and teachers, but I grew up with a fear of being on the wrong side of them. This seems to be sadly missing as so many people now believe this group of people cannot stop them doing what they want. All of this has been combined with a "its not your fault", "you didnt fail you just deferred the success" which has resulted in no consequences for people.
Finally all of this seems to have resulted in a lack of shame within society. People used to behave as they didnt want people thinking bad of them. Now they dont care what people think of them or how they behave.
I could also go on at length about the standard of parenting and the consequences of the breakdown of the family unit but I have already typed way too much.
)
