While I'm heartened by this news, I think we've got to be careful with the generalities. I think its generally true that kids tend to mimic their parents values, which would mean that if this news is true there must have been a good number of boomer parents who raised their kids properly.
On the other hand, the times we live in probably have some positive effect - GenXers have the advantage of seeing the deleterious results of their parents' generation's licentiousness.
I respectfully disagree. I think it is common for children to rebel a bit against their parents' values -- and they often gravitate to the values held by their grandparents. See the book "The Fourth Turning" for interesting generational studies of America.
I think its generally true that kids tend to mimic their parents values
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I think you are right, but what should be considered then is how many xers were exposed to their grandparents more than their parents. I know my grands were a big part of my life until we moved to Florida when I was 12 and incidentally I started going "downhill" when we made that move and I was then parented exclusively by my actual parents.
"Baby Boomers are a very strange anomaly. They are the Worst Generation (apologies to the many fine people who don't fit the stereotype)."
They tend to be a pain, I agree. But, it's pretty simple, really. The anomaly has its origin in a simple fact: they were the first generation to practice in grade school, middle school, and high school scurrying under their desks kissing their rear ends good bye b/c of a white hot fire ball that the depression era folks kindly invented. Their parents never had to practice that when they went to school during the last 'innocent' age.
(Don't get me wrong; a very, very large number of Japanese and Americans would have gotten killed but for the reality of the bomb - C. LeMay was burning down the whole country quite nicely ... but it was still looking like a million US soldiers would be required as an invasion force.)
Indeed, the boomers showed us xers that despite the bomb, self centeredness is simply a gross feature of character and hurts kids. I spend a good bit more time w/ mine, than my boomer parents did w/ me. But, I had the benefit of seeing how the boomers practiced dealing w/ the bomb in their psyches. I suspect, strongly, that if I had been a young person faced w/ daily nuclear holocaust propaganda .... and I had been in the first gen to experience .... well, I think I would have done a lot of drugs and been cursed w/ a lot more self centeredness than I struggle with....
The key point to be remembered here is that most of the boomers who would have raised their kids poorly chose to murder them in the womb instead
Bingo. My parents are still screwups, but my siblings and I got to observe first-hand to the extent they made a parade of poor life choices and the consequences of said choices. It wasn't that I was raised so well, but that I made a clear association between how my parents lived their lives and the lives they actually lived as a result. Apparently many people of my parents' generation still haven't figured out this correlation, but I sure as hell did and managed to avoid repeating their stupidity.
As a result though, I don't really communicate much with my parents any more, nor do any of my siblings. My parents live on a completely different planet and still don't see any kind of personal responsibility in how their lives turned out and are at least somewhat ashamed of how we turned out insofar as all their children vocally rejected the beliefs pounded into us as idiotic and foolish. I don't have much to say to a person who steadfastly refuses to examine axioms that are grossly and obviously defective, and that they think I owe them my lifes work because they "raised" me pretty much sets me off.