A Fresh Look at the Baby-Boom
Bulge
"By 1990, those aged 25 to 44 will control 44% of all households and 55% of consumer spending and be a majority of the electorate."
U.S. News & World Report
Me, turning 40? Is it really possible?
One greeting card maker — yet another industry that caters to the consumer appetite of baby boomers — has come out with a whole new line of cards just for those of us turning 40.
This new line of birthday cards, called "Over the Hill" cards, really knows how to rub it in. The cover of one reads, "Now that you're over the hill, you've got it all. . . ." Inside the card descriptive words complete the thought: ". . . bulges, sags, wrinkles, flab, back pain, hearing loss, flat feet and fatigue." Oh, the woes of aging boomers!
Card makers can stand to make some serious cash on these cards. Over the next 18 years around 4 million Americans will turn 40 each year.
Because it is such a large group of the U.S. population, the baby-boom generation has a lot of clout in society and
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business, including the greeting card industry.
Who are these people?
This book answers that question.
What Caused the Boom Anyway?
Why did our parents all of a sudden start having babies? The answer is tied to what was happening to our country in the mid-1940s: World War II. Economic hard times, the gloom of war, and the separation of most women from their husbands had kept young couples, our parents, from having babies. It's hard to make babies when you're separated by oceans!
In Europe, where my parents spent the war, World War II had left behind such devastation that it would be another five years before the inhabitants felt settled enough to devote themselves to serious baby-making. But those countries that had not become battlegrounds, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, experienced an immediate baby boom.
Many lives were lost during the war, but Americans came out of the war as winners with the worldwide reputation as the liberators of the oppressed. America was the primary power behind the cause of freedom. It was a time to be proud. It was a time to feel good about the future. It was time to settle down and raise a family. Americans were so confident about the future and determined to make up for lost time that the birthrate in 1947 was higher than at any time since the post World War I baby boom of 1921.
Statistics of an Emerging Generation
There is no question about it — the end of World War II brought on the baby boom. In May of 1946, nine months after V-J Day, there were an unprecedented 233,452 births in one month in the U.S. By the year's end, an all-time U.S. record (up to that point) of 3.4 million babies had been born — the biggest baby boom in U.S. history had begun. By
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the end of 1949, that total was brought up to 14.5 million. By 1954, our parents were producing 4 million babies every year. A new kind of invasion was taking place in America!
It was not until 1964, when the first boomers started getting married, that the birthrate began to fall below the 4 million mark. The birthrate in those years of 1946 to 1964 averaged 25 percent per 1,000 population, meaning that 250 women out of every 1,000 were having babies. Now, 3.5 million babies are born in the U.S. each year, but we have a much larger population and the rate is only 15 percent per 1,000, or 150 women out of every 1,000 having a child in a given year (Johnson 1988:790).
In March of 1986, U.S. News & World Report celebrated the birthday of our generation with a special issue devoted to looking at baby boomers reaching mid-life. The issue was written to celebrate the fortieth birthday of the first crop of baby boomers. In the feature article entitled "You've Come a Long Way Baby Boomers — When a Generation Turns Forty," the author describes boomers in this way:
As infants, they made diaper industry revenues soar more than 50% by 1957. As children, they swelled school enrollment by two thirds. (Have you noticed how many schools are now closed in your neighborhood?) As adults, they created such job competition that between 1973 and 1980 medium income for young men fell 17%.By 1990, those aged 25 to 44 will control 44% of all households and 55% of consumer spending and be a majority of the electorate (Rosellini 1986:60).
Baby boomers are the best educated 40-year-olds in American history, with an average of 12.9 years of formal schooling. More than 84 percent of us have completed high school, and almost half of us have finished a year of college. A total of 25.1 percent have attended four or more years of college (Rosellini 1986:61).
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At age 40, boomers are twice as likely to have been through a divorce as their counterparts living in 1947 when the boom began. About 80 percent of male boomers are married, and 77 percent of the females are married. Many of these marriages are remarriages, and the children of baby boomers today have some rather interesting networking going on as they try to stay in touch with their natural fathers and mothers.
Two Waves of Baby Boomers
The official demographers of the U.S. government bracket the baby-boom generation between 1946 (the first full postwar year in which birthrates surged) and 1964 (after which the birthrate fell). Now, of course, those of you like my older brother Peter, born in 1945, just before the official boom began, should not feel excluded. For all practical purposes, you're boomers too, by virtue of rubbing shoulders with the giant generation all your lives.
People born in the late 1940s obviously view life differently than people born in the early 1960s. Most experts who write about the boomer generation view 1957, the peak year of the boom, as the watershed year between two groups of baby boomers.
The Early Boomers. The half of our generation born in or before 1957 was the most influenced by the turbulent '60s. It was this group, of which I am a part, that was radically and permanently altered by the events and social movements of the '60s and early '70s. It is this group that is now turning 40 and making its values felt across our land.
This early wave of boomers experienced the assassination of John F. Kennedy. We all remember where we were and how we felt on that November day in 1963. This was perhaps the first and most stirring political memory for early baby boomers, but the event meant little to the second wave of boomers, barely out of diapers on November 22, 1963.
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Other events, like the moon landing and Woodstock in the summer of 1969, also had a powerful impact on this budding generation of early boomers. Of course, the Vietnam War was fought during the '60s and early '70s. Fifty-eight thousand soldiers, mostly baby boomers, gave their lives in this unpopular war. Three hundred thousand came home wounded, and 75,000 were permanently disabled in this war that sparked our rebellion as a generation (Simon 1988:3). Then Watergate in the early '70s completed our social fermentation as we sought a better way to run our country. These powerful forces on the political and social scenes in the '60s and early '70s made lasting impressions on the early wave of baby boomers, impressions that in turn shaped the values of a generation.
The Late Boomers. The triumphs and tragedies of the early boomers were merely pages from newly published history books to their younger siblings born after 1957. Perhaps the difference between the two groups is best put by Landon Jones, executive editor of Money Magazine, who has written what many feel to be the definitive work on the baby boomers. He says:
The older half of the generation was the most idealistic and the most easily disappointed. They're what people think of as baby boomers.The second half had diminished expectations. They were more realistic. They looked ahead and saw the world was crowded. They didn't think life would be handed to them on a silver platter. As for their cultural experiences, the older half was more euphoric. They were the youth society, the protesters. They had the sense that youth could take over the world, that rock and roll would bind us. The younger half had no charge. For them, rock and roll is taken for granted, and youth is something you had to pass through (Ingrassia 1986:14).
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As we'll see in later chapters, economic differences between the two groups are profound. The earlier group got the better treatment in their childhood, better educations in college, and the pick of jobs while there was still an abundance to choose from. Then came the 1970s when this late boomer group hit the job market and found it glutted with the early boomers.
It is this group of late boomers that is probably thought of as the "Me Generation," lacking a deeply developed social consciousness and seeking the American dream full steam ahead.
Ironically, it is the early boomers that began with such anti-materialistic zeal and ended up with all the "goodies" of affluence in the 1980s. The late boomers, focused on finding the good life right out of college, have had a very hard time reaching it. Whereas the early group could afford to buy houses when houses were still within reach, many of the later group have been shut out by skyrocketing prices unless they join the crowd of two-income families.
Oh, How We Love Labels!
The entire baby-boom generation is unique in a number of ways. It is the first generation to grow up with the threat of nuclear war, television, space exploration, the Pill, and LSD. It is a generation born right after the good war and thrown into the middle of what most felt was a very bad war.
We are also unique because we have become the most labeled generation in U.S. history. We have been dubbed the:
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Then there are more labels for subgroups within our generation. Consider the following:
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Not All Baby Boomers Are Yuppies
The label yuppie leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The fact is, no one likes to be labled, and we of all generations have had too many thrown at us. Although we have characteristics in common as a generation (the thesis of this book), no single label can define us. It is true that some people do fit the yuppie mold, but these individuals certainly do not represent the mainstream. One of the most serious mistakes anyone can make about our generation is to cast us all into that mold. Most of us simply do not drive around in Acuras and live a fast-paced lifestyle. In fact, only 5 to 8 percent of the population can accurately be called yuppies (Ingrassia 1986:13).
Richard C. Michael, coauthor of the recent Urban Institute Report to Congress on the economic future of the baby boom, explains:
Most of those portrayed to be baby boomers tend to be urban yuppies, but they're not very typical. Baby boomers are more likely to be a young married couple earning $25,000 a year total, trying to raise one kid, postponing a second one and wondering how to buy a first house — or, if they are in a house, wondering how they can afford higher education for their kids. . .. The bulk of them aren't doing as well as their parents, though it's hard to convince people that something is amiss (Ingrassia 1986:6).
The Tweener Backlash
Did you notice the word tweeners on my list of labels? It is an up-and-coming term for many baby boomers who don't
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want to be yuppies. Tweeners are among the growing number of baby boomers who resent being called yuppies. They work hard and don't want to be labeled as conspicuous, yuppie consumers because they try to live a sensible lifestyle.
Nikki Finke, staff writer for the L.A. Times, writes about these boomers in an article entitled "Tweeners" (January 24, 1988). She explains that the term tweener is not an acronym for anything but rather the invention of a New York journalist, working for ABC News, who borrowed the term from baseball. Just as a tweener in sports is a hit that falls between two outfIelders, so a tweener — in a larger context — is a well-educated, somewhat successful and well-off young professional caught between his low-rent roots and his high-paying career.
Actually, tweeners have been around all the time but have not gotten all the attention that the so-called yuppies have received. One of the characteristics of this new classification of baby boomers is a strong tie to their roots. Whereas yuppies want to excel and go beyond many of their non-college-graduate parents, tweeners are proud of their roots, want to be like their parents, and enjoy old-style, traditional American values. They enjoy frequent trips back home to see Mom and Dad when they get vacation time — rather than flights to some exotic Caribbean island for a tan fest. One final note observed by Finke is that tweeners have a strong commitment to altruism. They like doing volunteer work and serving the needs of the community. This is good news for local churches, always in search for volunteers (Finke 1988: VI; 1, 10).
I see this latest trend, or perhaps we should say this latest identification of a massive subgroup within the baby boomers, as an encouraging one. Tweeners tend to be hard-working and committed to the family. They hold to many traditional biblical values and have strong loyalty and commitment to the heartland of America.
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A Generation Still Searching for More
I find that baby boomers are still very much in search of their identity. A quick look at the media, full of explosive nostalgia that takes us back to the '50s and '60s, tells me that we're not sure where we're heading in the future. Sure, every generation gets hung up with nostalgia for a while, but when our children love the same music we loved in our teens, something is different!
Tom Shales, Washington Post TV critic, calls the 1980s the "re-decade," a decade which lacks identity and so creates one by reviving, repeating, or just ripping off the past (Levine 1986:75).
Could it be that we've reached most of our goals by age 40, and we're not as happy as we were back then? We had a whole lot less then, but we stood for a whole lot more.
In an article, "Hanging on to the '60s," Beth Ann Krier, L.A. Times staff writer, talks about the outpouring of movies, TV, fashion, music, and protest that are "kicking into high gear an obsession with that delirious decade of the 1960s." Why is there an obsession with the 1960s today? Some suspect that the issues of the 1960s and the sense of purpose that our generation had in those days have never been resolved or fulfilled. The 1980s seem to depict a lack of purpose in our generation and an increasing feeling that materialism and prosperity are a dead end (Krier 1988:VI; 1).
Is the generation that has tried everything finally tired of trying? Now that many of us have reached the pot at the end of the rainbow, are we ready for more, for something deeper, for something beyond externals? Is this the cue for the church to redouble her efforts to learn, listen, and speak to the baby boomers? Is this a golden opportunity for the church to reap in the harvest of millions of boomers who might finally be ready to settle down with the truth?
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Thinking It Through
1. Baby boomers have been the subject of much debate over the past few years. From what you have read in chapter 1, why are boomers worth discussing?
2. Baby boomers are different from other generations. What has shaped and molded this generation to make it unique?
3. At the end of chapter 1, questions concerning the lack of identity and purpose of the boomer generation are raised. What do you think about the author's basic conclusions? How do the Scriptures speak to this issue?
