"mere participation is frequently enough for a reward". I so feel that this is big time our/parents fault.

i think this was an over-reaction to the hard, judgmental attitude so many baby boomers' parents had, and were consequently raised with, causing them (us) low self esteem.

this caused our generation of BB's to act out to insane levels, glutting ourselves on hedonism.  think jim morrison as role model, elvis on different drugs.

in music it's like the difference between artists like bonnie raitt, jackson browne, ry cooder using rock to enlighten people and give them some righteous entertainment at the same time, morphing into the dark side of maroons chewing off chicken heads on stage, making up like effete fops or vampires, pretending to consort with the devil, chucking tellies out of hotel windows and generally behaving like overgrown teenagers with arrested development and a poseur hate-on for the world, especially all authority.

huge difference... as the music went, so followed society.

then the nihilistic doom of punk, the deathrattle of thrash metal, the grinding monotony of rap, the febrile chatterings and bleepings of ambient house garridge d'n'b techno corporate rebel-my-ass rock you freaking name it...

death by a billion bytes!

sorry for the rant. back to your point. yes telling kids they're unconditionally perfect, praising them with no criticism, coddling their egos, no clear boundaries: all these lead to difficult confrontations with reality once the bubble bursts.

the 60's raised a lot of hopes for serious change, but just like with obama, these hopes have largely been vapourware. we were drunk with possibilities and the sheer numbers of our generation's wave, innocently trusting good faith would excuse all our ignorance, and while instinctively distrusting the system, and thus gleefully willing its demise sometimes, we hadn't done much homework and had no better system to raise in its place. so many distinguished dreams sputtered out of gas and fell by the wayside, there is a lot of buried sadness in our generation about this. we were the first raised on images as much as reality, TV was new, and had us by the short and curlies right away.

but a lot of joy, in all the crazy waste and confusion. definitely a tendency to spoil the next generation of kids though, either by under- or over- parenting. my perception of gen Y is they're underfed with idealism, there's a sort of void in the back of the eyes in that dept, again this is probably a reaction to idealism OD in the boomers when they were young and the future still seemed rosier.

mysteriously, some young people grow up balanced and focussed, aware of how crucially serious many situations have become, but not letting that rob them of their natural optimism and good attitude. great kudos to their parents... there's no more responsible job in all of creation. i remain hopeful on this count. they have to work around the steaming pile their ancestors left them, just like we did with the cold war and its attendant terrors, and generational PTSD.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty