Is the term Boomer Generation loose enough to include someone born in 1936? If not, is there a term for those who were too young to have been drafted during WWII?
Strauss and Howe, one of the big generational theorists, would call that The Silent Generation.
The “Boomer” generation refers to a “Baby Boom” that happened AFTER WWII. It’s axiomatic that a Boomer was born after WWII. I’m not sure what the first year the population rose* was, but I assume it was 1946. IIRC, the first year the population fell compared to the year before was 1964, making 1963 the last year of the Boomers, meaning Gen X begins in 1964.
*Anecdote is not the singular of data, and all, but my husband came back from Iraq on Dec. 24, 2005, and I was pregnant by Jan. 7, 2006. Based on our friends’ experiences, we figured, “We start trying now, and I’ll be pregnant maybe by May.” Right.
That sounds right.
My parents had a 10-year age difference, which seems like a lot, but they were the same generation. Followed the same zeitgeists. They had more in common with each other than my mother did with Boomers, or my father did with people born just before the Depression hit.
The usual terms for generations are given in Generation - Wikipedia , where the generations get named as follows:
Lost Generation: 1883 to 1900
Greatest Generation: 1901 to 1927
Silent Generation: 1928 to 1945
Baby Boomers: 1946 to 1964
Generation X: 1965 to 1980
Millennials: 1981 and 1996
Generation Z: 1997 to 2012
Generation Alpha: 2013 to whenever
The whole idea that people can be divided up into generations in this way is ridiculous. Some of these names, like Lost Generation, came from characterizing a small group within the set of people born then. Some of them are utterly arbitrary, like someone decided that people born within a certain period of time had to have a name, so they made one up. Also, people now talk as if the baby boom was something that happened to the babies born in that period. Of course, it was really something that happened to their parents. A lot of people who were in age between about their late teens and about their early forties realized that now that the Depression and World War II were over, it had become easier to start a family, so they did.
But, you’re going to ask, aren’t there consistent things among people born from 1946 to 1964 and consistent things among people born from 1965 to 1980 and consistent things among people born from 1981 to 1996, etc.? Of course there are. There are also consistent things among people born from 1940 to 1948 and consistent things among people born from 1955 to 1970 and consistent things among people born from 1987 to 2003 and similarly for any other stretch of years. The world is always changing, and its effect on people is always changing. Everyone is different. In some ways they resemble people born about the same time they were. In other ways they more closely resemble people born well before them or well after them. Chopping up the years into arbitrary stretches is something that writers of pseudo-clever books about particular time periods and desperate advertisers trying to sell something new do.
Is it possible for someone born in 1936 to be part of the Baby Boom? Absolutely not. Some generational boundaries are vague, but it’s absolutely inherent in the definition of the Baby Boom that it was after WWII. Is it possible for a person born in 1936 to have more in common with the Boomers than with the Silent Generation? Absolutely.
Of course it’s impossible to draw bright lines around human experience and so the extent to which generations are rigidly defined makes them silly, as you say. And the quest to label every time period as it’s own generation has got ridiculous. But I think Boomer does make sense as category when taken as a whole, and if you allow a little fuzziness into your definition (how could you not).
The demographic baby boom is clear to see. And it coincided with an equally clear economic boom post-war. Which meant that by around 1960 there were a hell a lot of teenagers (a word coined in 1957 because it was needed) who directly or indirectly were the cause of a lot of consumer spending. So you have a large, affluent young generation who are coming of age in a time of high employment. Simply by existing, they generate a lot of economic and cultural change. This I think is what makes them different - you can define other generations by things that happened to them in formative years if you like (the Great Depression, WWI or II, 9/11) which as you say will always be somewhat arbitrary but the interesting thing about Boomers is that (collectively and unwittingly) simply by existing in such large numbers, they in a way created their own formative experiences. The Beatles didn’t happen to teenagers, teenagers created the Beatles (and everything that went along with them).
Where it falls down is if you then try to do the same thing for other age-groups who don’t have the same demographic imprint.
Most of the labels given to generations are a little silly and don’t explain much (especially the recent gens X Y an Z,)…
But the label “Baby Boom” is the opposite: it’s a pretty precise mathematical fact. And , as Stanislaus said in the post above, the mathematics match up with some very noticeable social changes.
So it’s a logical label to use.
And to answer the OP’ question: no-- 1936 ain’t a boomer baby.
This site shows the math: the number of births in the USA each year.
The numbers were stable every year till 1945. (about 2.8 milllion) Then in 1950, suddenly there’s a spike–30% more babies born(3.6 million) . (the table doesn’t list years 1946-49 unfortunately)
Then the number remains keeps growing for a decade, levels off for another decade and then declines steadily after 1964.
So the boom years start after 1945 and end after 1965.
Just in time for the kids to grow up enjoying the post-war economic boom, and then turn into hippies. 
Historical classifications tend to be retrospective anyway. And the list above is divided into 15 year generations, which for a start is less than the average actual time between generations in modern times.
I fall into the baby boomer group, but I would split that into two groups, those born in 1946 and soon after, and a second group that I would (if pressed hard) call the children of the new affluence, which essentially covers the Fifties and early Sixties.Especially with hindsight, I see a sharp divide between those lived through WW2, or were born in that period, and those born after 1945. Those who were around a decade older than I am are generally very different in attitudes.
And why the Silent Generation? Most of the 68ers fall into this group, and they certainly were not silent.
Watch this preview…
This guy talks a mile a minute and is hilarious to watch. I have seen the “What you are is what you were when” video made in the late 80’s; he’s updated it since then. His point is valid - a generation and what they think, what they believe and how they act is based on what they experienced during their formative years - whether it was the “Greatest generation” overcoming the depression and then the WWII experience that success/winning was the important thing; or the boomer generation’s confidence that there would always be abundance so career success was not as important as personal happiness. Gen X had to live in the shadow of the boomers and when the cost of 1950’s and 60’s abundance came home to roost. Who were your heroes growing up, in the 8-16 age group when society rather than family began to be the environment that formed personalities? What did much of the generation - especially the leaders and shapers - have in common?
Unfortunately, his videos are expensive corporate training material and so not easy to find. But - he makes a good case for the different generations and how their shared experiences shaped them…
The baby boom is, in some sense, a precise mathematical fact. (Let’s not capitalize it. It wasn’t an event that had been planned beforehand. Nobody said, “Hey, let’s all have babies right now.” It just happened that events like the Depression and World War II that no one had decided would have any relevance to the size of the population happened at a particular time.) It’s a precise mathematical fact that in U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the number of babies born rose around 1946 and dropped back to the previous level around 1964. That wasn’t even true in all countries. In other countries, the increase in the number of babies born only lasted for a few years and then dropped back to what it had been before. Incidentally, the birth rate had already begun to rise before the end of World War II. Furthermore, there have been quite a few baby booms in various years and various countries (even if we only count the people still living today), so picking just one baby boom is already arbitrary.
As I said, the baby boom was something that happened to the parents of the Baby Boomers, not to the Baby Boomers themselves. Furthermore, it wasn’t until the oldest of the Baby Boomers became teenagers that social commentators felt it was necessary to come up with a name that they could use to stereotype a group. One example of the way that using the term is the claim that the hippies were Baby Boomers. No, they weren’t really. The oldest of the hippies (in the way that the term was used back then) were, more or less, in the last half of the Silent Generation. The youngest of them were, more or less, in the first half of the Baby Boomers. The later hippies even thought of themselves as joining the movement late, not as being innovators. And hippies were never a majority of any age group.
Yes and no. The first hippies may have been born pre-boomer, but they grew up experiencing the same things as the boomer, only more and longer. I pick Tom Hayden (Chicago 7) at random, and he was born 1939. So by 1945 when WWII ended, he’d be turning 6 and becoming aware enough ready to experience the “boom” in economic abundance, scientific progress, social justice, music culture, etc. that characterized that time and formed that generation. The reverence for leadership during the war was being replaced by McCarthyist infighting, civil rights marches, and Cold War fears. If anything, being slightly older, he’d probably be impressed sooner and longer by what was going on.
That’s why generations are characterized. It’s the same idea as “Rock and Roll” vs. “Disco” vs “80’s music” and so on - there’s no explicit boundary for generations or music genres, plenty of overlap, but each is at its core distinct enough in character that like the definition of porn “I know it when I see it”.
We can talk about the baby boom as a mathematical exactness, but at its core the concept is the experience the whole cohort in general went through and the culture they share.
But to get back to the OP - going back to 1936, perhaps we’re getting too far back - depending on the person’s experience. Their 6 to 10 formative years would have been under the deprivation of WWII not the abundance of 1946 consumer boom.
The idea that people who listened to rock and roll were always being influenced by people even close in age to them is wrong. When someone born in 1962 listened to Roger Daltrey of the Who (born in 1944) sing about how people his parents’ ages were trying to put him down, the fan born in 1962 might even be listening to someone the same age as his parents, since their parents could have also been born in 1944. Daltrey was, at best, being metaphorical when he was claiming that there was some clear divide between him and his parents, and his fans should think the same about their parents, even if he was the same age as their parents. The divide between these supposed generations was arbitrarily created by social commentators (and desperate music producers) in the late 1960s. I was around then, and I remember how much I hated what I thought of as “youth chauvinism” in rock and roll (even though I was younger than the people singing and writing those songs). Yes, I thought that some ideas, more often believed in by older people, were wrong and new ideas, more often believed in by younger people, were better, but I hated the way that this was turned into a battle of the generations. Political change is something more than frivolous teenage rebelliousness.
There is, in astrology, the concept of being born “on the cusp”. The same thing could be applied to the concept of generations. Someone like Obama, born in 1961, shares more, arguably much more, with the next generation than with the one he was born into.
Instead of “loose”, the correct word is “meaningless” (as typically applied to anyone born between 1946 and 1964)*. Stretching it to 1936 would make it only marginally more ridiculous.
*my older brother and I are technically both “baby boomers”. He grew up thinking the Kingston Trio was the cat’s ass.
I ask you.
Thanks Wendell Wagner. So those who came of age in WWI ( “Lost Generation”) can be subsumed with the 1883-1900 period. Is that correct?
I know there is some leeway in these terms, but as it the term Boomer explicitly refers to the Baby Boom that happened at the end of WW2 it would be absolutely nonsensical to include someone born during the depression (and the associated FALL in birth rate) as a boomer.
Given the way the world is going, I like to term the latest generation as the Doomers.
The baby boom is a real incident if limited to the rise in births to some 4 million a year but the notion that they somehow stayed alike over over eighteen years is nonsensical.
I’m a boomer who just turned 70, which means that most of my friends are - or were; death happens - also boomers. I’ve noticed that the earliest boomers tended to not find computers easy to work with. There’s a sudden change for those born around 1948 or 1950 who got into them in the mid-80s and never had a problem.
Boomers born in the late 50s missed the 60s almost entirely. They didn’t become teenagers until the 70s. They adopted the outer trappings - rock music, jeans, drugs - but missed the civil rights era, the peace and love generation, and the antiwar efforts. Their attitudes weren’t - couldn’t possibly be - the same about these defining events.
I worked closely with someone born in 1963. Technically a boomer but in every possible way an alien. Wonderful as a person but the generational difference was bottomless because they attended college in the 80s.
Baby Boomers were a real thing. Several hundred thousand soldiers returned home from war and started families.
That started a housing boom, new schools were built, more restaurants. The economy boomed for many years because of that large generation of children.
I’ve always felt the boomers ended by the middle to late 50’s. I guess the soldiers returning from Korea also started a lot of families and that extended the boomer generation for a few more years.
I think the idea of generations is a valid one. Here is how my life was made much easier by the generation I was born into.
I was born in 1937, about the middle of the small depression cohorts. When I started school, the classrooms were not full. I went to the all-academic HS just by choosing to do so. Later generations would have to take an exam to get in. When I applied to college in 1954 I likely could have gotten into most any school I applied to. The reason was that during the half-decade 1945-50 schools had expanded to accommodate the GIs and suddenly they faced the twin problem of large faculty and small bodies of applicants. When I got my PhD in math in 1962, there were only about 250 of us in math. Moreover, they were facing the facts that many of their older staff were coming up to retirement age (then compulsory) and the boomer generation of students was looming. I had no trouble finding a university position and received at least one utterly unsolicited offer. Only 8 years later, most of the slots had been filled and there were over 1000 new PhDs in math every year. Now I am retired, receiving generous benefits, while those who follow are not guaranteed the same. At every stage of my life I have benefited from being the generation I was.