it is no longer up to the children to sort it out amongst themselves, they are taught to go and get an adult
You're supposed to do that after failing to sort it out yourselves. And then the adult is supposed to help you sort it out yourselves.
having been guilty of being final arbiter myself I understand it's a lot easier in the moment especially if you're short on time and just want them to go away but it creates a lot more problems thanb you're solving right now
A lot of younger workers these days have an expectation that their workplace is also their social place, meaning that they expect to have friends at work and they can get quite socially clingy. However, at the same time, they have little commitment to the workplace itself and will move every year for a pay rise, walking into the new job expecting it to replace the social circle from the last.
I've known a couple of people (including a current friend who is older than me) who are like that. I'm not sure about the other people were always like that or ended up like that but I do know that the older friend ended up like that because the job took up a lot of time but it was something they were very passionate about anyway so the friendships formed within the workplace were a lot easier to maintain than the ones outside. They have also been at the same workplace for a couple of decades though which is weird these days apparently XD
Some workplaces don't seem to give payrises beyond whatever they're forced to. J has moved jobs multiple times over the years because as he gained experience and was supposed to be "moving up" the employers basically fully expected he take on more and more and more responsibilities/work but didn't want to bump the pay accordingly. He's happy with the current job (they did actually try to bump him to management recently but he doesn't want to do management) because they let him work from home and is apparently at the stage where lifestyle is more important than bigger pay packets so has actually been not applying for other ones which might have higher pay.
I don't even know if that's a recent thing or a thing that started ages ago as I remember said ages ago one of my aunties was switching jobs to something that paid better and had apparently done that a couple of times and one of the other relatives commented about how she had "no company loyalty", but what those relatives didn't get was that the companies they were working for took really, insanely good care of its employees and not all of them were like that.