Yeah, “some.” I was/am a boomer, and my friends and I had to fear the draft (the guys, anyway) and participated in anti-war activities rather intensively for years.
The boomers have never been that different from other generations, but they are so numerous that, whenever they reach a certain age, the activities of that age dominate the culture. (The phrase “like a pig in a python” is often used.)
I think the first thing that people can do is memorize the period covered by each of the standard generation names:
Lost Generation 1901 to 1927
Greatest Generation 1901 to 1927
Silent Generation 1928 to 1945
Baby Boomers 1946 to 1964
Generation X 1965 to 1980
Millennials 1981 to 1996
Generation Z 1997 to 2012.
Generation Alpha 1913 to present
You merely confuse everything when you talk as if the divisions between the generations mean something, but you don’t even get the divisions right. Note that we currently have a U.S. President who belongs to the Silent Generation and a living ex-President who belongs to the Greatest Generation. Far too many people talk as if everyone older than them grew up in a similar way and everyone younger than them grew up in a similar way.
A bigger problem is that the divisions are arbitrary. There have never been dates at which the culture changes suddenly. People try to get around this by talking about early, middle, and late parts of a generation. Just use the years you want to talk about instead of trying to get the generation names into your point in a sloppy way.
Note that this means that the baby boom was not something created by the baby boomers but by their parents.
Sorry, I meant to write that the Lost Generation was 1883 to 1900.
I think I see a problem there…
also:
That’s a seriously long generation.
I like Randall Munroe’s suggestion that the next one should be called Generation 
.
Sorry, another mistake, since it should be this:
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 to 1996
Generation Z 1997 to 2012.
Generation Alpha 2013 to present
I do this occasionally. I try to carefully copy what I want to write from some reasonably good source like Wikipedia. I write fast and I forget to carefully check what I’ve written. I’m too often tired as I write.
Naah, that’s cool. I do that too.
I’m not sure I made the point I was trying to make very clearly. I was saying we folks who were called the “baby boomers” tended to think of ourselves as a generation and that there was a generation gap that distinguished us from the older generation(s). So it’s not just a label imposed from outside onto people who don’t define themselves that way. I mean, yeah, you could still say “thinking of themselves as such doesn’t make it so”, but it still acquires some meaning if enough people think of themselves as “a generation” and share at least a loosely defined sense of the borders marking them off. A bunch of us shared this self-perception. Not that there wasn’t cynicism about it, of course there was, a bit of ::rolleyes:: and all that, but as a notion it shaped how a bunch of people thought of themselves in the plural.
If generational titles were used substantially to distinguish between the lived experience of different generations they might be meaningful. In my experience however this is not the case.
Overwhelmingly, generational titles are used to allege differences in outlook. And from the studies I have seen those differences are not particularly substantial and indeed are positively underwhelming. And certainly out of all proportion to the hype.
I never thought of it as a useful term, and I don’t remember anyone else except lazy journalists as thinking of it as such.
I guess the question I have is “useful to who beside marketers selling products targeted to people of different ages?”
Not sure about the accuracy, because this is from a magazine article some decades back. The claim was made that the baby boom didn’t happen because people decided to have a lot of children. The boom happened when married couples with two children, who were feeling frisky, shrugged and went ahead with no birth control because they were doing well enough to afford three children, if a third child were to come along.
In other words, there was a significant increase in the number of three-child households. I have no idea how to fact-check that.
Like all stereotypes, generational titles are most useful when they let me make reliable assumptions. They are least useful when the stereotypes are unfounded.
For example I recently posted in a thread about U.S. law and data privacy. I made the assumption that the reader understands how when you make a phone call, the recipient number goes to the phone company which connects you to the recipient. Because back in the day, until electronic switching became the norm, there was a live operator. I have been told that people generally understood the role of an operator (live or automated) well into the late 20th century. I know this board skews towards Gen X and baby boomers. So when I quote an old court case that turns on the numbers being disclosed to the phone company, I don’t have to explain that background. If I was writing for a younger audience, I may have used a different approach, because a mental model based on today’s technology could be very different.
~Max
My assumption has been that many people held off having children because of the Depression and then World War II and then decided it was time to have children. The article I’ve linked to below says that what happened was that there was a post-war economic boom. I don’t really know what happened:
I can’t know the reasons, but we can see that (in the US), there was a uptick of 3 child mothers and downturn in 0 and 1 child mothers between the mothers born in 1910 and 1930 (don’t know why 1920 cohort isn’t present). At least according to page 36 of this document.
Like most things we do in this society, I think it is definitely overdone. Now, we seem to be naming generations just because it has become stylish to do so.
There was a huge difference in Japan between children born before WWII and those born during and after. The government was completely different, the education system and society completely changed after the war.
Japan had a much higher peak for Baby Boomers, and it really started the trend of two children.
The generational titles accurately identify the years when people were born and the state of the world they grew up in. Of course people will try to establish generalized attributes for those people because apparently some people just can’t stop themselves from doing that but there’s no reason anyone has to buy into those conclusions.