"What has happened is that the children have become more popular than the parents and folk music - to a larger audience ...."

I've been in agreement with just about every thing Ron has been saying in this discussion, but not this (well, maybe not all of it, and/or not in the sense that I'm understanding it).

Is the genre under discussion, that of all-originally-written contemporary song, really that widely popular? Not as far as I can see: I know absolutely nothing about it, never hear a bit of it, and no radio station within my on-the-air reach ever plays any of it. (I'm sure that internet-radio sources exist everywhere, of course.) More traditional forms of American folk music, on the other hand, have some audience in and around the Gulf South, however small, and some presence on the radio and in performance venues.

I could be wrong, but it certainly seems to me that interest in such stuff is geographically regional, and demographically fairly limited.

By extension, it just might be that the acceptance of using the category-name "folk" to describe such music is also confined to a fairly limited circle of enthusiasts, in which case Don and Bill et al have a point.