Ideas about how to raise children and how they ought to behave have changed radically in the past two generations. School was way more regimented and strict and less tolerant of kids who couldn't sit still and be quiet and orderly, etc., and the workplace was way less tolerant of any kind of personal life intruding, including making provisions for parents, needs for flex time or different schedules, much less working from home. Some people thrive on that atmosphere but some people really suffer under heavily structured atmospheres, when they could be making a contribution if some accommodation can be made for their what-used-to-be-thought-of-as inadequacies. I see a lot of working from home in my life. My neighbor is an assistant and she works from home 3 days a week! I'm on a four-day work week (4 long days and one day off). The main person I work for is almost never in the office, but responds to email pretty much 24/7, as do I.
There is also a definite shift at least where I work towards giving more affirmations and cultivating an environment more sensitive to peoples' feelings and needs as individuals. Part of this is because the profession has shifted to much higher numbers of women (when it was, 20 years ago, fairly rare to see a woman law partner), and part of it is because the younger generations just operate that way.
Characteristics of Indigo children (some of whom are said to have come here in the 50's, to start paving the way toward this kind of change) are now almost mainstream.
Descriptions of indigo children include the belief that they are empathetic, curious, strong-willed, independent, and often perceived by friends and family as being strange; possess a clear sense of self-definition and purpose; and also exhibit a strong inclination towards spiritual matters from early childhood. Indigo children have also been described as having a strong feeling of entitlement, or "deserving to be here." Other alleged traits include a high intelligence quotient, an inherent intuitive ability, and resistance to authority.[4][6] According to Tober and Carroll, indigo children function poorly in conventional schools due to their rejection of authority, being smarter than their teachers, and a lack of response to guilt-, fear- or manipulation-based discipline.[7] (wiki)
I am biased, of course, because that description matches me to a T. I was at my mother's house last week, and looked at old pictures and my old report cards starting from kindergarden, and all the remarks were the same, and reflected the above characteristics as unfortunate and to be corrected. That attitude and the trying to force me to knuckle down and submit made me take up a lot of energy fighting something that was kind of unnecessary to begin with. (For me, it wasn't that I rejected authority, it's that I didn't recognize it, and that's pretty much from birth. If my mother tried to be authoritarian with me, it amused me. If she beat me in frustration, I was indignant. I was born that way. I remember as far back as about 3 years old wondering who this person was who thought she should boss me around and interfere with my will.)