Can no-one do anything for themselves any more?

I suspect they had less space to be fragile and so they weren't. A child in the 80s would have been playing outside and mixing with kids of different ages and importantly would have had to deal with conflict as part of that, and would have gone to the local shop on their own or to parks without an adult plus would have probably dealt with the local angry neighbour who hated kids outside their house and from 13 many had paper rounds or by 16 would have been doing part time work (so dealing with adults and the public) if not full time work, and an even higher percentage in the 1970s would be in work by 16. Schooling and clubs weren't so led by adults either so spats between kids had to be sorted out by them far more. And no doubt there's dozens more little things that appear minor and unimportant in your formative years, but they built up independence and coping skills/resilience. Now we have the snow-plough parent that pushes obstacles out of the way of their child so they don't have to deal with things themselves (even get them showing up to Universities) or leisure time that involves being at home so many kids just aren't developing coping skills. Or another way to look at it. Most people cannot just show up at a gym and lift heavy weights or run a marathon without training, and that training is a series of small unimportant and low consequence efforts that accumulate over time into ability. Yet with mental health and coping skills we seem to have shifted to a position of removing low consequence 'training' as much as possible, and seem to have an awful lot more fragile people - and the internet enables them to maintain that fragility far more (or even encourage it). A related point, but I was talking to somebody about the dying out of pub culture. They noticed that young people don't know how to handle ordering drinks at the bar (queuing has become a thing that some try to start) as they don't have that experience of the social negotiation that goes on. The pub was a place for calibration tuning as spouting off some conspiracy theory would have resulted in massive piss taking or if you'd been aggressive and rude towards someone because they didn't agree with you then a punch in the face might have followed, but now people say horrendous things online and get pet theories confirmed by other idiots as they filter out dissent from their bubble. And that social mixing meant again learning how to cope with other people.