My elder son caught on to the adults' ruse at a tender age. We were driving away from the closing ceremony of summer day camp at our church, where he'd just received a handful of awards, including one for being "Most Inquisitive."

"That's really great, honey," I said in my most cheerful mommy voice. Through the rear view mirror, I saw him roll his eyes.

"It's bogus," he said. "They give tons of awards to everybody there. They just want you to have" -- another eye roll -- "good self-esteem."

He was 8. Now that he's almost 18, he and his two siblings are full-fledged members of the most awarded, most fawned over, most celebrated (obsessive scrapbooking, anyone?), most materially comfortable generation in history. They have grown up in a culture that embraces, without irony, Garrison Keillor's tongue-in-cheek description of Lake Wobegon, the fictitious Minnesota town where "all the children are above average."

In school these days, the B "is the new C," a Post-Gazette article announced Sunday. A's have become so commonplace and grade point averages higher than 4.0 so routine that the B now signifies the merely average.

This means the C's and D's that, ahem, some of our kids occasionally bring home are truly abysmal, though I like to think of them as conscious statements of defiance against our culture of anxious over-achievement.

The over-achievement is everywhere and seems to be, to quote my youthfully cynical son, "bogus." Three different national studies released this year have found a marked rise in students' grades that is not supported by a matching improvement in their aptitude test scores. Reporter Eleanor Chute's story explores how a few local high schools and colleges are approaching this problem and is well worth reading.

So is a story we published in March on a disturbing rise in college students' levels of self-centeredness and narcissism. Researchers studied responses to the standardized Narcissistic Personality Inventory, given to 16,475 college students across the country from 1982 to 2006. Results showed that students' NPI scores have risen steadily, to the point that two-thirds of today's students rank above the 1982 average.

So narcissism is yet another way that "all the children," OK, just two-thirds of them, "are above average." But like grades that falsely imply excellence where it doesn't exist, this creeping self-centeredness is definitely not a good thing. What changed from 1982 to 2006? What else didn't used to be the way it is now?

The typical woe-is-me answer to such questions is that a hyper-competitive culture, time-chewing television and other alienating technologies, parents working outside the home, dinners eaten on the run and life lived in a moving minivan are what changed.

Those are all true. You know what else changed? The level of parents' guilt.

The "Greatest Generation," which survived the Depression and won the second World War, also created and raised the baby-boomers. Most moms tended house and made family dinners, and dads took us to Little League games where individual medals and trophies were definitely not passed out to every player just for showing up with a pulse.

Yet when those boomers reached their teens and created a drug-using, war-protesting, free-love, rock 'n' roll counterculture, the parents deemed it the epitome of shallow self-regard. And to a great extent they were right.

We boomers, never tested by fate in the way our parents were, have created a more fractured and selfish culture in which to bring up a new generation. Many moms have gone to work. Families live much farther from offices and shopping districts and waste more time commuting. We're not together much, and when we are, we're emotionally and technologically distracted.

We are, therefore, worried that we're not doing this thing right. So we calm our fears of child neglect by lavishing the little ones with empty awards. And in so doing, we're secretly communicating to our children that life is really supposed to be all about them. "Here's another medal! Will you please forgive us for having responsibilities besides fulfilling your every desire?"

I think we're overdoing it. Most of us, men and women, work outside the home. Get over it: Life is work.

Of course there are parents out there who are failing their children, who spend all their time chasing money and status and success, whose kids know they're an afterthought.

And there are teachers who mean well when they use grades to encourage kids and send them the message that they're worthwhile. But they shouldn't because, well, life is work.

But the pendulum is swinging back toward health. I know more parents who are struggling to work less and to consume less, so they can give their kids the things that matter most: Time. Eyeball-to-eyeball conversation. Rules.

No amount of meaningless awards and inflated grades can fill the psychic hole caused by a parent's disinterest. But trying to patch it up with gifts and easy grades and empty gestures will go a long way toward creating little monsters.