In this plot of US birthrates, the “baby boomer” generation is shown in blue, ranging from 1946 to 1964 (according to the US Census Bureau).
I’m not a demographer, but intuitively this makes sense: the war was over, people could finally relax and start making/raising families.
But what was happening during WW2? The economy was clawing its way out of the Great Depression, which explains the increase of birth rate through the 1930’s, but what’s with the big spike in 1943, and the subsequent dip in '44 and '45? That’s a 10% increase/decrease in birth rate in the space of just a couple of years. What was happening to cause such up-and-down fluctuations?
Mobilization of US troops to Europe and the Pacific didn’t get all that massive until the spring of 1942. You’d expect a lot of those last home leaves to get pretty physical. For the next couple of years, the men just weren’t home.
You might want to check birth rates in England for those same years.
Sure. The “Take leave after basic, get married, hurried honeymoon, ship off” stories weren’t completely fiction. And a lot of those probably resulted in honeymoon babies. Hence, the spike.
That’s my speculation, anyway. I’ve heard that story enough from friends of the family from that generation. I’d be curious to see if that particular narrative was supportable by research to reliably explain that spike.
That does not look like a big spike to me, it looks like the peak of a four-year upward trend from 1939 that was starting to taper off for at least a year or two before the decline started. Presumably, people in that time period were anxious over the brewing situation and seeking comfort where they could find it.
