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A baby boomer is a person who was born during the demographic Post-World War II baby boom. The term "baby boomer" is sometimes used in a cultural context, and sometimes used to describe someone who was born during the post-WWII baby boom. Therefore, it is impossible to achieve broad consensus of a precise definition, even within a given territory. Different groups, organizations, individuals, and scholars may have widely varying opinions on what constitutes a baby boomer, both technically and culturally. Ascribing universal attributes to a broad generation is difficult, and some observers believe that it is inherently impossible. Nonetheless, many people have attempted to determine the broad cultural similarities and historical impact of the generation, and thus the term has gained widespread popular usage.
In general, baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values; however, many commentators have disputed the extent of that rejection, noting the widespread continuity of values with older and younger generations. In Europe and North America boomers are widely associated with privilege, as many grew up in a time of affluence. As a group, they were the healthiest, and wealthiest generation to that time, and amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time.
One of the unique features of Boomers was that they tended to think of themselves as a special generation, very different from those that had come before. In the 1960s, as the relatively large numbers of young people became teenagers and young adults, they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the change they were bringing about. This rhetoric had an important impact in the self perceptions of the boomers, as well as their tendency to define the world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon.
The baby boom has been described variously as a "shockwave" and as "the pig in the python." By the sheer force of its numbers, the boomers were a demographic bulge which remodeled society as it passed through it.
The term Generation Jones has been used by Jonathan Pontell to distinguish those born from 1954 onward from the earlier Baby Boomers.
Definition
The United States Census Bureau considers a baby boomer to be someone born during the demographic birth boom between 1946 and 1964. The Census Bureau is not involved in defining cultural generations.
Influential authors William Strauss and Neil Howe label American Baby Boomers 1943 to 1960.
In Ontario Canada, one influential attempt to define the boom came from David Foot, author of Boom, Bust and Echo: Profiting from the Demographic Shift in the 21st Century , published in 1997 and 2000. He defines a Canadian boomer as someone born from 1947 to 1966, the years that more than 400,000 babies were born. However, he acknowledges that is a demographic definition, and that culturally it may not be as clear-cut.. Doug Owram argues that the Canadian boom took place from 1946 to 1962, but that culturally boomers (everywhere) were born between the late war years and about 1955 or 1956. He notes that those born in the years before the actual boom were often the most influential people among boomers. For example, in other words (The Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones), while those born in the 1960s might well feel disconnected from the cultural identifiers of the earlier boomers.
Bernard Salt places the Australian baby boom between 1946 and 1961.
Characteristics
Size and economic impact
Seventy-six million American babies were born between 1946 and 1960, representing cohorts that would be significant on account of its size alone. This cohort shares characteristics like higher rates of participation in higher education than previous generations and an assumption of lifelong prosperity and entitlement developed during their childhood in the 1950s.
The age wave theory suggests an economic slowdown when the boomers start retiring during 2007–2009.
Cultural identity
Boomers grew up at a time of dramatic social change. In the United States, that social change marked the generation with a strong cultural cleavage, between the proponents of social change and the more conservative. Some analysts believe this cleavage has played out politically since the time of the Vietnam War, to some extent defining the political landscape and division in the country.
In 1993, Time magazine reported on the religious affiliations of baby boomers. Citing Wade Clark Roof, a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the articles stated that about 42% of baby boomers were dropouts from formal religion, a third had never strayed from church, and one-fourth of boomers were returning to religious practice. The boomers returning to religion were "usually less tied to tradition and less dependable as church members than the loyalists. They are also more liberal, which deepens rifts over issues like abortion and homosexuality."
It is jokingly said that, whatever year they were born, boomers were coming of age at the same time across the world; so that Britain was undergoing Beatlemania while people in the United States were driving over to Woodstock, organizing against the Vietnam War, or fighting and dying in the same war; boomers in Italy were dressing in mod clothes and "buying the world a Coke"; boomers in India were seeking new philosophical discoveries; American boomers in Canada had just found a new home and escaped the draft; Canadian Boomers were organizing support for Pierre Trudeau. It is precisely because of these experiences that many believe those born in the second half of the birth boom belong to another generation, as events that defined their coming of age have little in common with leading or core boomers.
The boomers found that their music, most notably rock and roll, was another expression of their generational identity. Transistor radios were personal devices that allowed teenagers to listen to The Beatles and The Motown Sound.
In the 1985 study of US generational cohorts by Schuman and Scott, a broad sample of adults was asked, "What world events over the past 50 years were especially important to them?" For the baby boomers the results were:
-
Baby Boomer cohort #1
(born from circa 1946 to 1955), the young cohort who epitomized the cultural change of the sixties
- Memorable events: the Cuban Missile Crisis, assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., political unrest, walk on the moon, risk of the draft into the Vietnam War, anti-war protests, social experimentation, sexual freedom, drug experimentation, civil rights movement, environmental movement, women's movement, protests and riots,Woodstock, mainstream rock from the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix experimentation with various intoxicating recreational substances
- Key characteristics: experimental, individualism, free spirited, social cause oriented
- Key members: Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush
-
Baby Boomer cohort #2
or
Generation Jones
(born from circa 1956–1964)
- Memorable events: Watergate, Nixon resigns, the Cold War, lowered drinking age in many states 1970-1976 (followed by raising), the oil embargo, raging inflation, gasoline shortages, Jimmy Carter's imposition of registration for the draft, punk or new wave from Deborah Harry and techno pop to Annie Lennox and MTV
- Key characteristics: less optimistic, distrust of government, general cynicism
- Key members: Douglas Coupland who initially was called a Gen Xer but now rejects it and Barack Obama who many national observers have recently called a post-Boomer, and more specifically part of Generation Jones
Aging and end-of-life issues
As of 1998, it was reported that, as a generation, boomers had tended to avoid discussions and planning for their demise and avoided much long-term planning. However, beginning at least as early as that year, there has been a growing dialogue on how to manage aging and end-of-life issues as the generation ages. In particular, a number of commentators have argued that Baby Boomers are in a state of denial regarding their own aging and death and are leaving an undue economic burden on their children for their retirement and care.
Impact on history and culture
An indication of the importance put on the impact of the boomer was the selection by Time magazine of the Baby Boom Generation as its 1967 "Man of the Year." As Claire Raines points out in ‘Beyond Generation X’, “never before in history had youth been so idealized as they were at this moment.” When Generation X came along it had much to live up to and to some degree has always lived in the shadow of the Boomers, more often criticized (‘slackers’, ‘whiners’ and ‘the doom generation’) than not.
See also
- Demographics of the United States
- Generation gap
- Baby Boom Generation
Notes
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^
a
b
Owram, Doug (1997),
Born at the Right Time
, Toronto: Univ Of Toronto Press, p. x, ISBN 0802080863
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