"This is just another advantage boomer parents are giving their kids," Ms. Cookman said.

Did boomer parents actually do something right?

We need more boomer parents setting good fiscal examples for their children.

They are bought by Gen X and boomer parents who played them in their youth, in a time when board games were the acme of entertainment - with no competition yet from Xbox or reality TV.

Members of Generation M do not seem to sleep as much as their boomer parents did.

Some was generational - boomer parents like me, fearful of seeing our teenagers become drug-addled slackers.

That giving up the family vacation is a rite of passage a lot of boomer parents are going through right now is little comfort.

"This is a whole generation of boomer parents who've been so involved with their kids from the beginning," Ms. Snay said with appealing self-awareness and a trace of apology.

But boomer parents have a dilemma unique to our generation.

Now here I was, reacting to Lilly's desire for pancakes in the way every enlightened boomer parent swore on a lid he or she would never behave: just like my parents.