Chapter 3

Gauges of Ages : Boomers and Busters, Yuppies and Buppies

Baseball pitching great Satchel Paige once asked, "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you was?" Today his pithy homespun wisdom takes on almost prophetic proportions. As Americans experience greater longevity, living beyond their time rather than, as in previous generations, dying before their time, the definition of "old" has been redefined. And as the median age of Americans reaches 41 by 2030, it will need to be redefined again.

   The elderly are no longer called "senior citizens"; they are "chronologically gifted." Because of modern medical life-extension practices and the possibility of replacement body parts, the surge of seniors is sometimes referred to as "the generation of immortals."

   "Our society is getting older but the old are getting younger," says Robert B. Maxwell, vice-president of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP).¹

   This unprecedented demographic change portends more than an elderculture; a coming generational culture shock faces our nation, which has been young for most of its history. Several futurists warn that our society, as a result, may stiffen and grow less flexible.²

   To understand this coming age wave, we need not only statistics,

Page 36

but an identifiable classification of the stages of ages. Following several shorthand models, we see:

• The Elderly, who represent what the authors of Lifetrends call the "old guard," are those who had passed their seventy-fifth birthday by 1990, and the "new elders," those between the ages of fifty-five and seventy-five in 1990.³

• The "boosters" are those born between 1927 and 1945, so designated by Tom Sine because they "are the stabilizing edge of the generational wave of the nineties" and "tend to be the most supportive of American culture, institutions and values."⁴ This category overlaps Lifetrends' Eisenhower generation," born between 1935 and 1945, and the younger "new elders."

• The "baby boomers," born between 1946 and 1964, are some 76 million strong. The subject of much sociological study and media hoopla, boomers are further divided into "early" boomers (born in the first half of the "baby boom" and "late boomers.

• The "baby busters," born after 1964, were between the ages of eighteen and "twentysomething" at the beginning of the 1990s. They fall between the illustrious baby boomers and "the boomlet of children that the baby boomers are producing."⁵ Busters derive their label from being born during the period when the nation's birthrate dipped to half the level of the great baby boom following World War II.

• Finally there are today's teens and pre-teens, who by 2001 will be fashioning an identity of their own.

Is Living Longer Better?

   Half of all Americans who have ever lived past the age of sixty-five are alive now! And population experts estimate that the 12 percent of our population currently aged sixty-five and older will escalate to 23 percent by the middle of the 21st century. Already the fastest-growing age segment in the country is those over eighty-five. With their numbers increasing more than three times as fast as the rest of the population, these present 3 million elders will swell to 16 million by 2050.⁶ And science, meanwhile, keeps increasing the span of human life.

Page 37

Is that good news or bad? At issue, of course, is more than just maintaining life at any cost.

   "If we can extend life expectancy by 10 years or 20 years, we need to be assured that the additional years of life are healthy years," declares medical demographer S. Jay Olshansky of the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. "If we are adding 30 years of crippling disease, then I don't think we should do it."⁷

   The care of the elderly is posing hard choices both at home and in government.

   Elderly Americans often need help with home care or medical attention through the health-care system. This can be extremely expensive for the individual and his or her family. Substantial life savings can be wiped out in a matter of weeks.

   Social Security and government medical programs are already cracking under the strain, and the scenario can only worsen when there are more recipients and fewer paying in through the work force. In 1950, the ratio of workers to retirees was 120 to 1, but if the current trend continues, the ratio will fall to a mere two workers per retiree by 2030.⁸

   Former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm is upset about what he feels is a combination of runaway medical expenses and an excessive sense of entitlement created in the elderly.

   "Poverty in America is more likely to wear diapers than a hearing aid," he complained in a New York Times opinion piece. Noting that the elderly have the highest disposable income and the lowest poverty rates of any group in the nation, he added that through Medicare "we are paying the health costs of hundreds of thousands of elderly millionaires, while 20 percent of America's kids don't have all their vaccinations and 600,000 American women give birth every year without adequate or any prenatal care."⁹

   Meanwhile, new kinds of care for the elderly are on their way. Despite the boom of retirement-type communities, such as the Sun Cities and Leisure Worlds, they house only about 3 percent of retirement-age Americans. At present, about 90 percent of Americans over the age of fifty-five live in "regular" housing, usually in the areas where they raised their children.¹⁰

   But this is predicted to change as more and more begin congregating into life-care facilities that provide everything from prepared

Page 38

communal meals to medical care. Elders who can afford it are increasingly turning to continuing-care complexes offering private rooms or suites, three restaurant-style meals a day, maid service, and a variety of activities. When health declines, nursing care is available.

   In 1990, the average age of new residents in these facilities was seventy-nine. Nationwide, 700 such communities — many of them operated for profit — housed 210,000 residents at the turn of the decade; and the number and variety of continuing-care complexes is expanding rapidly.¹¹

   Innovative home-care services, adult day-care, and a profusion of other programs to help the disabled elderly are also proliferating, allowing the frail or chronically ill some control over their lives in familiar surroundings rather than in traditional nursing homes. These new approaches include home-repair services, day centers (there were about 2,200 such centers in 1990 compared with only a dozen twenty years earlier), foster homes for the elderly, and eldercare collectives.¹²

   Foster-care networks, suggests Richard Ladd, administrator of Oregon's Senior and Disabled Services Division, can help the elderly who need long-term care but do not have complex medical needs. "Too often we put them in nursing homes where they have less control over their lives and less freedom than the average prison inmate."¹³ Oregon also emphasizes assisted-living apartments in which the elderly and disabled live in a setting where meals and housekeeping are provided and additional services like nursing are added when needed.

   The churches of the next millennium will need to be a part of this action.

   The Parish Nurse Resource Center, based in Park Ridge, Illinois, already has nearly 100 active "parish nurses," with 400 more in training. These nurses are helping churches integrate end-of-life concerns, bioethical considerations, quality of life, and modification of worship services so all can participate.¹⁴

   Betsy Jamerson, a former director of nursing who has been on the staff of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, since 1988, has developed a church health-care ministry to old and young alike.

   "Health care is part of the stewardship of our lives," says Mrs. Jamerson.

Page 39

In addition to visiting and assisting the sick, she checks blood pressures every other Sunday at church, and also leads classes in subjects such as holistic health care, signs and symptoms of illness, basics of home nursing, and dealing with losses.¹⁵

   The other side of the elder coin reflects "the new vision of retirement [which] intermingles work, play, learning and service," says Ken Dychtwald, executive of Agewave Inc., a research and consulting firm in Emeryville, California. Older people are increasingly interested in "sharing their wisdom, not retiring from life," adds Cathy Ventura-Merkel, a senior education specialist for the American Association of Retired Persons.¹⁶

   One model of "creative retirement" for the new elders and aging boomers is the combining of volunteerism with community service. At the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement, nestled in the furrows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, these concepts are linked with a national movement toward retirement-age learning. Here, several thousand participants annually take part in the programs, which include a College for Seniors, programs that provide mentors for young people and tutors for elementary and high school pupils, and an annual Senior Wellness Day offering everything from health screening to mall walking.¹⁷

   Church analysts see an opportunity in the chronologically gifted. Older folks are more apt to be affiliated with a church and are, according to a recent Gallup Poll, among the most religiously active in the nation.¹⁸ These elders, if they are in good health, will have more time than employed younger members to spend in church activities and leadership.

   One Presbyterian church in Alaska started a day-care program staffed largely by senior volunteers, which keeps costs down while providing a cross-generational linkage.¹⁹ Elsewhere, seniors are working in shelters for the homeless and tutoring in inner-city schools.

The Boomer Agequake

   Baby boomers grew up in a world unlike any that previous generations had known: Dr. Spock influenced their homes with his positive-reinforcement, permissive child-rearing methods; television

Page 40

served as their ever-present babysitter; the atomic bomb threatened their instant annihilation; and the Pill and birth control guaranteed them the "sexual revolution."²⁰

   The leading edge of the boomer generation is now rounding forty and headed for fifty. When they turn sixty-five, between 2010 and 2030, boomers can expect to live an average of at least seventeen more years, with women outlasting men by about seven.²¹ By 2010, a deluge of new boomer retirees will cause eldercare to eclipse child care as a national priority and potential career market.²²

   In the late 1990s, "more pioneering companies will build on the precedent of day care and begin offering partial reimbursement for eldercare costs as part of the overall trend toward cafeteria plans in which employees select from a menu of different benefits according to their needs," note Naisbitt and Aburdene.²³

   The travel industry will reap the benefits of an increased market for year-round vacationing as boomers become preoccupied with leisure time.

   The impact of the boomers on the next several decades is summed up well by Paul C. Light in his book Baby Boomers:

The baby boomers packed the maternity wards as infants, the classrooms as children, and the campuses and the employment lines and mortgage markets as young adults. To the extent [they] think alike, they define the contemporary culture. To the extent they buy alike, they shape the economy. To the extent they are both preceded and followed by much smaller generations, they stand out in sharp contrast to those around them.²⁴

   "Boomers, as a generation, differ sharply from their elders," observes James F. Engel, professor of marketing, research, and strategy at Eastern College Graduate School. "There is greater tolerance for diversity and ready acceptance of formerly taboo lifestyles. They are motivated by economic wellbeing, good personal relationships, and a comfortable family life. The international arena is not a primary part of their world view."²⁵

   A significant boomer legacy, declares Wade Clark Roof of the

Page 41

University of California at Santa Barbara, is the lack of bearing chronological age has on specific life experiences and events.

Baby boomers approaching 40 are not in the same life situations that their parents were at this age: they have stayed in school longer, started work later, married and had children later, and based their families on two incomes . . . We are no longer very certain to which age group we are referring when we speak of the young, the middle-aged or the old. These are culturally created categories which are easily recast in times of demographic shifts.²⁶

   At this writing, almost half of American households are headed by a person born between 1946 and 1964. He or she is media oriented and likes rock music. One-fourth have college degrees, and many are open to spiritual concerns and the church — if they are approached in the right way.

   Also, within the boomer culture (and to some extent the baby busters) exists a small subculture called "yuppies" — young urban professionals — who represent perhaps 1 to 3 percent of the population. Stereotyped as the BMW-driving, affluent city-dweller, yuppies are conservative politically and economically but liberal in terms of social, sexual, and lifestyle issues. Though largely white, this subculture includes an elite class of "buppies" — black urban professionals.

   Emerging out of this boomer culture is what the authors of Lifetrends call "the new older women," many of whom have worked outside the home and are financially independent. "They have known a diversity of family styles and are no strangers to high levels of divorce, remarriage, single parenting, and step-families. Older single women, either divorced or widowed, are the fastest-growing group in America; by 2001 half of persons over sixty-five will be single, with women in this category outnumbering men by a three-to-one margin."²⁷

   Single or not, boomer women will be considered "cultural transmitters" as they spend more time fulfilling a variety of overlapping family roles during their lengthened lifetime — child, spouse, parent, grandparent — than any other generation in history. Lifetrends authors

Page 42

predict that nearly one-third of boomer women in their late sixties will still have a living parent. As the mediators between, and sometimes caretakers of, several generations, they will thus find themselves at the center of family relationships.²⁸

   Needless to say, boomers are having and will continue to have significant impact on the face of the church.

   Roof's extensive survey of baby-boom religiosity showed that roughly two-thirds brought up in a faith dropped out sometime during their teenage and early adult years, and that 40 percent have stayed out. A third never did abandon church attendance (although they may have switched churches), and at least a third of the dropouts have returned.²⁹

   Younger boomers are more involved in traditional organized religion. Older boomers, shaped by the civil rights and counterculture era of the 1960s, tend to be more liberal and more likely to be involved in alternative religious forms. Married boomers without children (the so-called DINKS — Double Income No Kids) are the "least religious segment" of the post World War II birth boom.³⁰

   In order to plot new strategy, churches will need to examine more closely what brought the boomer returnees back to the fold. Roof thinks one magnet is that, having tried everything else, boomers are now looking for a religious heritage for their children and answers to their own spiritual questions.

   In the context of family life, marriage, and careers, "my hunch is there's a lot of picking and choosing going on in this generation — one that really believes in choice," Roof said in an interview. "I know there is a lot of switching. There is also a searching to put it all together, to look to religion for some help on that. Churches that grow will provide new and innovative ways to deal with those concerns."³¹

   In any case, the church that attracts and holds boomers in the early 2000s will have a much more hybrid, experiential style than the traditional denominational congregation of the 1970s and 1980s.

   That fact, laments Rick Warren, pastor of boomer-attracting Saddleback Valley Community Church in Southern California's populous Orange County, means most churches would have to make changes that would kill their existing congregations.

   "So I . . . advocate that every church should be starting new churches, and many of those should be targeted to reaching baby boomers," Warren adds.³²

Page 43

The Twentysomething "Boomerangs"

   As the graying baby boomers pursue recreation, recycling, and retirement, 48 million baby busters are moving into the working world. Many in this twentysomething generation don't like what they find and would rather return to the less-demanding roles of adolescence.

   American youth, observes Newsweek religion editor Ken Woodward,

are taking longer to grow up. As the 20th Century winds down, more young Americans are enrolled in college, but fewer are graduating. They are taking longer to get their degrees. They take longer to establish careers, too, and longer yet to marry. Many unable or unwilling to pay for housing, return to the nest, or are slow to leave it. They postpone choices and spurn longterm commitments. Life's on hold; adulthood can wait.33

   The baby bust generation also seems to have a hard time focusing on a cause, unless, perhaps, it is the environmental movement.

   Tom Sine sees the busters strongly attracted to the acquisitive, materialistic, status-oriented values of the boosters. But they also place very high value on the autonomy of the boomers. "Busters have been seduced by the sirens of instant gratification" as no other generation.³⁴

   A more kindly assessment is that they are simply "open-minded samplers of an increasingly diverse cultural buffet" and that they possess "a sophistication, tolerance and candor that could help repair the excesses of rampant individualism" so characteristic of boomerism.³⁵

   An estimated 40 percent of young people in their twenties are children of divorce; millions more come from dysfunctional families. They are gingerly threading their way through the landmines of addictions, violence, and teen suicides. AIDS and other sexually

Page 44

transmitted diseases have cast a cloud over what many expected to be the sunlit age of sexual freedom. Yet those born in the late 1960s and 1970s are having sex earlier than their parents did, and fifteen-to nineteen-year-olds are having more babies than their older brothers and sisters did.³⁶

   Baby busters want satisfaction from their jobs — and good pay. But the crass materialism of yuppiedom is out, and public service is in. So are relationships — with caution. Many prefer living together to taking a chance on an early marriage; and more than half say they would not like a marriage like the one their parents had.³⁷

   Baby busters have few heroes, though they tend to romanticize a hazy past when, presumably, values were clear and people were committed.

   Alert churches and youth ministries will latch onto that yearning, as well as to the teenage generation coming after.

   Although a 1989 Gallup Poll found that the lowest church attendance was among the buster ages of eighteen to twenty-nine (32 percent), teen attendance (57 percent) was the highest of any time since Gallup began collecting the data in 1980.³⁸

   These findings surely pinpoint the importance of youth ministry in church growth, especially since about two-thirds of all Christians make a commitment to Jesus Christ before they turn eighteen.³⁹

Chapter Four  ||  Table of Contents