CBSNews.com has an article that describes the characteristics of the children of baby boomers -- the generation who were born between 1982 and 1995, otherwise as known as Generation Y or the Echo Boomers (sounds like some kind of rock group, doesn’t it?). What makes this generation different from the rest (from, say, my generation, Generation X)? Here’s an excerpt:

They are much different than their self-absorbed, egocentric baby boomer parents. “Nothing could be more anti-boom than being a good team player, right? Fitting in. Worrying less about leadership than follower-ship,” says Howe. “If you go into a public school today, teamwork is stressed everywhere. Team teaching, team grading, collaborative sports, community service, service learning, student juries.”

“When you ask kids, ‘What do you most hope to achieve there?’ Where they used to say, ‘I wanna be No. 1. I wanna be the best.’ Increasingly they’re saying, ‘I wanna be an effective member of the team. I wanna do everything that’s required of me,’” says Howe. And you can already see some results.

Violent crime among teenagers is down 60 to 70 percent. The use of tobacco and alcohol are at all-time lows. So is teen pregnancy. Five out of 10 echo boomers say they trust the government, and virtually all of them trust mom and dad.

Very interesting. I might be missing something, but I thought that one of the criticisms of the latest generation of young people is just the opposite -- that they feel they are entitled to all kinds of things, and that they want everything now, like they’re playing some kind of video game. In other words, they have no sense of delayed gratification.

Are these two sets of characterizations of the Echo Boomers contradictory?