How old now are the following generations, and what were the year’s did/do they claim as their age? Baby Boom Generation, Me Generation, X Generation, and Y Generation. Did I miss some? That is, what years were the generations in question born and what years can they claim to be their generation
I believe the Baby Boom Generation was born in the years following WWII, which means the very first were in their 20’s from 1965-1975. I am not sure if being in their 20’s is what gives a group claim to a time period and makes it their generation or not. What does? This is, is it still the age of Generation X or not?
There is a fascinating book on the subject called Generations. Its premise is that generations change at approximately 20 year intervals and that they are of four basic types of generations which repeat in a pattern. (Thus Boomers would have had characteristics in common with the generation born 80 years before them.)
Most people designate 1945 as the beginning of “The Boomers,” but this book has them beginning with births in 1943.
I don’t recall all of the designations for the past century. But I can certainly tell a difference in the generation that my sister belonged to – The Silent Generation – and the one that I belong to – The Boomers. Yet she is only five years older than I. Before the Silent Generation was the G.I. Generation and The Lost Generation was before that.
If Generation X followed the Boomers, then it should have much in common with the Lost Generation.
Another generation should have begun around 1983 approximately, and still another last year.
The book postulates that the Civil War was so disruptive that it resulted in an interruption of the four generation cycle.
Of course, this is all speculative, but the book is very insightful and intelligently written.
The notion of generations has been bastardized by commercialsm which attempts to define what THE Newest New Generation is…
On the other hand, I was born in 1963 and therefore labeled a baby boomer. That’s funny…didn’t go to school in the 50’s, missed the missle crisis, my mom didn’t take me to see the Beatles and I was just a few months old when Kennedy was assassinated. My first significant memory was the Moon Landing in 1969 and the rest of my older counterparts from my generation were wearing long hair and getting stoned at Woodstock when I was 6. Nowadays, I should be retired, yet I have 3 sons; 16, 7 and 2 year olds still in our house, yet they should have been in college and left us with Empty Nest Syndrome.
Actually, my Aunt lived through everything described here and she was the true Baby Boomer…I cannot identify with the classic boomers like she did. I see a typical generation actually being 10 years by decade, not 20 years. I don’t even identify with the Me generation either.
Disco and Punk Rock…now THAT I can relate to…
My brother was born in 1964…eh, forget it.
Network news anchors like to refer to those who were around for WWII as “The Greatest Generation”. Personally, I think that’s a little overly generous.
At least Tom Brokaw does. I haven’t read his book, but I can see why he could make a pretty good case for it. They survived both the Great Depression and World War II. Many also survived WWI as children – and the horrible flu epidemic that killed so many, malaria, diptheria, thyphoid fever, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War and the first Persian Gulf War. They have been pretty tough and not terribly whiney. So many learned to make do and manage money well.
The Greatest Generation (as Brokaw puts it) are the people whose childhood was spent in the Great Depression and whose men came of age during World War II. When they came home they started making babies and living out the new american dream of suburbia and television. There children were the baby-boomers, who spent their childhood in the 1950’s and came of age in the 1960s. The Beaver and Opie as childhood peers? Boomers. Hippies in the 1960s? Boomers. Yuppies in their 1980s? Boomers.
The whole point about Generation X is that they are a tweener generation. They are too young to be Boomers (the results of the postwar population boom) and to old too be the boomers’ children. Their parents were born during the Depression, not before it, when people were making less babies. Their parents were children during the war years (think A Christmas Story). GenXers were born in the 60s/early70s. in the early 1990s they had a brief run at things. They were disaffected because they weren’t the part of the power generation before them on that generation’s children, who were coming up next.
A pet peeve of mine is the term Generation Y. I was born in 1979. My parents are boomers. My grandfathers fought in WWII. Why should my generation’s name be a derivative of a generation whose entire point was complaining that they weren’t me or my parents. I think part of that is that popular rock music seems to have gotten stuck in 1992 and therefore the whole GenX=young people thing is stuck in people’s heads even though it hasn’t been true for a decade now.
That said, its suprising that the generation currently entering the workforce doesn’t have a proper name like the baby-boomers or Generation X. Both of the names i can think of are derrivatives. GenY, which I already discussed, and the Echo generation, which plays of the boom our parents made. Anybody have any idea what my generation is called?
Actually, all GenY references I’ve seen put the cutoff at about the mid-80s for the beginning, while “true” GenX went through the mid-70s. This leaves me (another 79er) as belonging properly to neither “generation”.
On the other hand, I think that the late 70s/early 80s kids were the first to grow up entirely after what I see as the main wave of poststructuralism. Everyone right around my age that I know finds self-reference in media hilarious, and intuitively “gets it”, for instance. In fact, my friends who took English 101 in college were surprised to find out how unsurprising (to our worldviews) “po-mo” is. On that ground there would be reason to call the generation after GenX the “post-modern generation”, and scrap this GenY nonsense, which also takes care of that nasty gap right around us.
However, the fact that we are steeped in poststructuralism means we see how ludicrous the notion of a “generation” is. The standard deviation for childbearing age is huge now. It used to be that most people had kids right around their early 20s, so the 20-year “generation” made some sense. Now my grandparents (on each side) delayed having kids until my grandfathers returned from the war (putting them into their 30s when they had kids in the late 40s), and my parents delayed having children for professional reasons (which is more and more prominent today). In all, my grandparents were the age of most of my friends’ great-grandparents. Clearly the notion of “generation” is an artificial label that used to fit more snugly, but which has come loose over the years.
There is some sort of sociological cohesion to people of roughly the same age. To wit: I remember long discussions of the finer points of the Thundercats in college, while my brother (in college now) and his friends have barely heard of it, and only then through their older siblings. I loved The Electric Company growing up, but people a single year younger than me go blank when it’s mentioned. The timescale of this cohesion is far less than 20 years, and it also gets swamped by many other variables (by and large, the Thundercats reminiscers were white and from middle-class backgrounds. A tendancy towards the males was noted, but not enormous), so it’s at best a secondary variable. “Generation” just doesn’t cut it.
I think my first post on the SDMB was a complaint about the label “Baby Boomer Generation”. The way this group is treated in the media, you’d think that they were all born in 1945, grew up as the first TV generation watching Howdy Doody and the Micky Mouse Club, either served in Vietnam or became hippies (or both), sold out in the 1970s, and are now all retired.
But the Peak of the Baby Boomer borths was in 1955 (the year I was born), and most lists have Baby Boomer borths continuing until sometime in the 1960s. The Bulk of “Baby Boomers” were this far too young to have participated in the supposed formative and defining events of the generation. Most of us were born after Davy Crockett and Howdy Doody were on the air. We were too young, most of us, for Vietnam or for Woodstock. We weren’t yet in our thirties when thirtysomething was on TV, and we’re still far from retirement.
The media has been tracking the bare beginning of the Boomers , rather than the crest, and treating them as if they defined the whole group. I haven’t looked into it, but I’ll bet they mischaracterized the other “Generations” as well.