In the 1880's to 1890's when WWI soldiers were typically born, it was a very different world with much harder, shorter lives then. Typically married at 20, with about 25% of women in the family way before the day and they had typically 4 to 8 kids, 1 or 2 would typically die in childhood, doctors were largely quacks. Hard manual work, poor diet and whole families often malnourished. Men went to work, women ran the house & household. Tin bath in front of the fire in the winter once a week, with the rest of the house unheated. Working clothes Monday to Saturday & Sunday best on Sunday and church. Candles, or if you were the lucky rich with gas lighting, in an evening, so life revolved much more round daylight No radio & no TV. 98% of males in WWI smoked. Transport was trains, horses & horse drawn busses or walking when you were born, but motor vehicle and bicycles were becoming common by WWI.
Communities were strong, where life was easier and better if you looked after each other and taking responsibility and doing your family chores started young. Social security was the very last resort Poor Laws and parish workhouses.
This century has seen the general trend of all of us progressively having less muscle and more fat, wealth, creature comforts, vaccinations, modern medicines and operations. Industrialization has progressed from the coal fired mechanical steam age to the gas and petroleum one, to electricity, electrical machines and finally into the electronics and computing era. Communications have changed from telegraph, to telephone, radio, television and cell phones.
The pace of political, technological and social change has been getting faster and in some ways going in a circle where working class wealth peaked in the 1970s and has been squeezed since the launch of the IBM PC in the 1980s for the unskilled and semi-skilled. The middle class have just about held their own with the winners being the in demand highly skilled, technologists, technocrats, creative industries, entrepreneurs and other business owners and of course the elites. 1990's onwards globalization has produced and abundance of much cheaper food and goods.
It is easy to blame the kids but like us they will find their way in life and have many challenges with many of them very different for each generation. As we age we all live through more, learn more and have more life experiences. Where each generation has been on this planet less time than each older generation, you can't expect them to know as much and much that they do is very different to us.