Outgoing captain of the Spirit of Bermuda Chris Blake raised some interesting points about the programme and about Bermuda in a story in The Royal Gazette on Monday.

First, he said the Spirit sailing programme has been very successful and has seen 450 teenagers take part, but needs community support if it is to grow. It should get it.

"The students definitely seem to get quite a lot from it," he said. "We have feedback from schools and parents that they are very pleased with the results."

More importantly, he raised some vital points about Bermuda's young people.

Capt. Blake, who has spent decades working with young people in sail training programmes, said he was surprised when he first started working with young Bermudians by how materialistic they are.

"The young people here have a lot of stuff, iPods, clothing, modern conveniences, more than I have seen before," he said. "They are much more things minded."

Capt. Blake also noted that many of the sailors had never had to take responsibility for even basic chores.

He said of two girls who were assigned to wash dishes: "One turned to the other and said, 'I can't wash this, it's dirty'. She'd never washed a dish in her life. Some of them have never made their beds. If nothing else, it is a few days away from their mothers."

This will come as no surprise to many readers. One of the "problems of prosperity" is that children and teenagers in Bermuda expect to have the "best things" in life but have no sense that they, or someone else, have to work to provide them.

Parents who "want the best for their children" often fail to realise that the lessons they teach those children when they provide "the best" unconditionally is that they are teaching the worst life lessons.

Similarly, "helicopter parents" who hover over their children's every activity, argue with coaches and teachers and even do their children's homework fail to allow their children to learn independence and to make the mistakes that we all learn from.

Make no mistake: We are all guilty of this. Few parents are immune, least of all this writer.

But the community runs the risk of creating a society where expectations are unreasonably high, where everything is expected to "come easy" without the necessary work being done, and where "someone else" – parents, teachers, the Government, the employer are expected to provide people's wants.

Alternatively, young people coming out of school or university and entering adult life get a rude shock, and may spend years unlearning the bad lessons their elders and supposed betters have, often unwittingly, passed on.

That's why programmes like the Spirit of Bermuda, the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, outward Bound, the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Scheme and, yes, the Bermuda Regiment, are important. Often, they teach the life lessons that parents and others have failed to give.

So we need to ensure that these programmes have the support, financial and otherwise, that they need, if only to start to redress the errors we have made in raising our children.

But as parents and adults, we also need to ensure that our children get the tools they need to be responsible and contributing adults. It should not be someone else's job.