This comment and the previous one in the thread feel very salient, especially in the view of assuming good or bad faith. We've all been children, it's the burden of our human condition, but it feels like assuming others had less-than-pure intent as children because that was how you viewed the world as a child, speaks very directly to the environments in which we're raised along with changes in social mores over time. I'm mostly interested in the dynamic where one person assumes that children act in bad faith, I assume because they think kids are 'trying to get away with it', while the other person points out that from a child's perspective, they are trying their best to model behavior of those around them.
I guess it seems like if you're raised around people who are always acting in bad faith on some level ("Everybody is doing it", "It won't hurt if nobody notices", etc) then you're going to assume that there is always some ulterior motive even without any further evidence.
Is it worse or are we just getting better data on it? It seems just as likely that these states simply went unreported due to having nobody who was interested in listening. Might be that the quiet desperation has always been there, but now it gets voiced to a receptive audience.