Baby Boom

The end of World War II brought a baby boom to many countries, especially Western ones.
There is some disagreement as to the precise beginning and ending dates of the post-war baby boom, but it is most often agreed to begin in the years immediately after the war (around 1946), ending more than a decade later. The Various authors have delimited the baby boom period differently. The United States Census Bureau considers a baby boomer to be someone born during the demographic birth boom between 1946 and 1964. Landon Jones, in his book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (1980), defined the span of the baby-boom generation as extending from 1943 through 1960, when annual births increased over 4,000,000. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, well known for their generational theory, define the social generation of Boomers as the cohorts born from 1943 to 1960, who were too young to have any personal memory of World War II, but old enough to remember the postwar American High. The generation can be segmented into two broadly defined cohorts. The Leading-Edge Baby Boomers are individuals born between 1946 and 1955, those who came of age during the Vietnam War era. This group represents slightly more than half of the generation, or roughly 38,002,000 people of all races. The other half of the generation was born between 1956 and 1964. Called Late Boomers, or Trailing-Edge Boomers, this second cohort includes about 37,818,000 individuals, according to Live Births by Age and Mother and Race, 1933 98, published by the Center for Disease Control's National Center for Health Statistics. When the war ended in 1945, millions of veterans returned home and were forced to integrate. To help the integration process, Congress passed the G.I. Bill of Rights. This bill encouraged home ownership and investment in higher education through the distribution of loans at low or no interest rates to veterans. Returning G.I.s were getting married, starting families, pursuing higher education and buying their first homes. With veterans benefits, the twenty-somethings found new homes in planned communities on the outskirts of American cities. This group, whose formative years covered the Great Depression, were a generation hardened by poverty and deprived of the security of a home or job. Now thriving on the American Dream, life was simple, jobs were plentiful, and a record number of babies were born. The baby boom triggered a housing boom, consumption boom and a boom in the labor force. Between 1940 and 1960, the nations GDP (Gross domestic product) jumped more than $300 million. The middle class grew and the majority of Americas labor force held white-collar jobs. This increase led to urbanization and increased the demand for ownership in cars and other 1950s and 1960s inventions. When the number of persons is rising rapidly it is necessary to prepare for the increase. Houses and apartments must be built; streets must be paved; power, light, water, and sewer systems must be extended; existing factories, stores and other business structures must be enlarged or new ones erected; and much machinery must be manufactured. And thats exactly what happened. The metropolitan areas of the United States exploded in growth and led to huge suburban developments, such as Levittown. In the United States, approximately 79 million babies were born during the Baby Boom. In 1946, live births in the U.S. surged from 222,721 in January to 339,499 in October. By the end of the 1940s, about 32 million babies had been born, compared with 24 million in the 1930s. In 1954, annual births first topped four million and did not drop below that figure until 1965, when four out of ten Americans were under the age of twenty. Much of this cohort of nineteen years (1946-1964) grew up with Woodstock, the Vietnam War, and John F. Kennedy as president. In 2006, the oldest Baby Boomers are turning 60 years old, including the first two Baby Boomer presidents, Presidents William J. Clinton and George W. Bush, both born in the first year of the Baby Boom, 1946. Baby boomers are associated with a rejection or redefinition of traditional values. In Europe and North America boomers are widely associated with privilege, as many grew up in a time of widespread government subsidies in post-war housing and education, and increasing affluence. As a group, they were the wealthiest, most active, and most physically fit generation to that time, and amongst the first to grow up genuinely expecting the world to improve with time. They were also the generation that received peak levels of income, therefore they could reap the benefits of abundant levels of food, apparel, retirement programs, and sometimes even "midlife crisis" products. Baby boomers control over 80% of personal financial assets and more than half of all consumer spending. They buy 77% of all prescription drugs, 61% of over-the-counter drugs, and 80% of all leisure travel. 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. In 1993 Time magazine reported on the religious affiliations of baby boomers. 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".
The baby 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 west, baby boomers comprised the first generation to grow up with the television; popular Boomer-era shows included The Brady Bunch, Gilligan's Island, The Twilight Zone, The Ed Sullivan Show, and Happy Days. 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 1966 "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 in this authors opinion. One of the contributions made by the Boomer generation appears to be the expansion of individual freedom. Boomers often are associated with the civil rights movement, the feminist cause in the 1970s, gay rights, handicapped rights, and the right to privacy.

Baby Boom

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The end of World War II brought a baby boom to many countries, especially Western ones.

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