Anyone know the origin of the term 'baby boomers'? I hear it all the time and I heard on tv today that the baby boomers were almost ready to go into retirement. How did they get to be baby boomers?

A baby boomer is someone born in a period of increased birth rates, such as those during the economic prosperity that in many countries followed World War II. In the United States, demographers have put the generation's birth years at 1946 to 1964, despite the fact that the U.S. birth rate actually began to decline after 1957. William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book Generations include those conceived by soldiers on leave during the war, putting the generation's birth years at 1943 to 1960. Howe and Strauss argue that persons born between 1961 and 1964 have political and cultural patterns very different from those born between 1955 and 1960 and fit into what those writers term the Thirteenth Generation or Generation X (also known as the Cold War generation) born between 1961 and 1981. As the influence of Strauss and Howe has grown, a smaller number of people still accept Baby Boomers as including those born after 1961, although there are some who put the dates at 1946 to 1963 because of the number of significant "Gen-X" figures born in 1964. - Wikipedia

Thanks Dorian. I guess the ones born in 1946 were the ones referred to as getting ready to start retiring. It still doesn't make much sense to be called baby boomers, unless I'm just not quite understanding.

As a boomer myself, it's a label that's permanently attached to our generation, like "Gen-X" to a later generation. We keep the labels no matter how old we get. They were building new schools for us when we kids. Now they're building us new retirement homes. Because of the large size of our demographic, we boomers will soon suck Medicare and Social Security dry.

There were 78 million babies born in the US from 1946-1964. That number is more than 1/4 the current population of the US. I can't think of any aspect of life in the US that has not been affected by that extremely large group. Housing, jobs, colleges, (un)employment, advertising, auto sales, styles, television programming, radio, music, political campaigns, and many many more things were massively changed because of the Boomers. Even as we approach retirement*, we are changing the concept of "senior citizens." When the Boomers were growing up, a man in his 60s or 70s was considered old in every sense. Now, men (and women) that age run marathons.


*Many have already retired. Almost all the friends I have that went into teaching are retired, thanks to "early outs" and increasing payrolls of school districts. The salary of one teacher with a Master's and 30 years' experience is generally twice that of a teacher just out of college. That means that a school board can pay two teachers with the same amount of money that they were paying one. Of course, generally speaking, experienced teacher do a better job than new ones, so in reality, what the school boards are doing is sacrificing quality for quantity, but that is the only way some can meet their budget.