You may be right... but might it also be the case that the people who are doing something about it just aren't making a big deal about it?
I suspect many people in their 20s and early 30s can think of a time when they were rewarded just for showing up. One year of little league was like that for me. Some of my non-core (or non-STEM, in modern parlance) classes felt like that, though I tended to participate actively in those. Put a lot of stories like that together and it's easy to say that the self-esteem culture affects everyone, and a small step from there to say it affects everything.
But that doesn't take into account my other four years of little league. Or my many music auditions. Or the difficult years when I decided I didn't want to do homework. (I assure you my grades suffered those years.) No one involved in those things was making a political statement; they were simply allowing the natural consequences of my actions to work.
Obviously everyone has different experiences. But I suspect a lot of people would be able to recall fewer cases in their lives where mere participation was rewarded than those where natural consequences were quietly present.
I suspect many people in their 20s and early 30s can think of a time when they were rewarded just for showing up. One year of little league was like that for me. Some of my non-core (or non-STEM, in modern parlance) classes felt like that, though I tended to participate actively in those. Put a lot of stories like that together and it's easy to say that the self-esteem culture affects everyone, and a small step from there to say it affects everything.
But that doesn't take into account my other four years of little league. Or my many music auditions. Or the difficult years when I decided I didn't want to do homework. (I assure you my grades suffered those years.) No one involved in those things was making a political statement; they were simply allowing the natural consequences of my actions to work.
Obviously everyone has different experiences. But I suspect a lot of people would be able to recall fewer cases in their lives where mere participation was rewarded than those where natural consequences were quietly present.