Demographers attribute roughly half of the postwar "baby boom" to unusual fecundity, the other half to an unusual bunching of family formation. The main bulge, from 1946 to 1957, resulted from the coincident babymaking of the late-nesting Greatest and early-nesting Silent. After 1957, most last-wave Boomers (and first-wave Generation X) were the younger children of large Silent-headed families.28
The baby boom itself was due partly to this adult optimism and partly to a natalism that encompassed all the fecund age brackets. While early nesting Silent produced roughly half the Boomer babies, the late-nesting Greatest set the nurturing tone. The vast birth numbers amplified the exuberance of the early postwar years, the "American High." In contrast to the Silent, the cloistered products of a birthrate plunge, Boomers came to resemble the yapping and multiplying puppies in 101 Dalmatians, symbols of plenitude.29
"We wanted our children to be inner-directed," recalled Greatest Eda Leshan. "It seemed logical to us that fascism and communism . . . could not really succeed except in countries where children were raised in very authoritarian homes." Recalling their own youth collectivism, wincing at the McCarthy hearings, and worried about bland young Silent Generation adults, Leshan's Greatest peers wanted to raise children self-focused enough to resist peer pressure and "-isms" of all kinds. Boom children, perceived as the modern kids of a modern age, enjoyed a hothouse nurture in intensely child-focused households and communities. As Greatest dads worked to pay the bills (without the kids' knowing where the money came from), Greatest moms applied what Leshan termed "democratic discipline," dealing with children "thoughtfully, reasonably, and kindly."30
Seeking advice, these moms turned to a like-aged pediatrician, Benjamin Spock, who mixed science with friendliness and instructed his Greatest peers in his Common Sense Book of Bay Care, first published in 1946, that "we need idealistic children." Dr. Spock wanted to produce a new kind of child, and in many ways he did. Later, the phrase Spock Baby would be applied to an entire generation of babies of the American High--babies who were born through an era in which his book sold more than a million copies annually.31
Coaxing (rather than pulling rank) in the nursery, Spock-guided moms applied his "permissive" or "demand" feeding schedule to infants, letting them eat when they wanted, not according to fixed rules. Extending this logic to older kids, my-child-is-my-career moms invested tremendous maternal time and energy in grade-school Boomers. They hosted Cub Scout dens, typed book reports, cleaned children's rooms, and nudged their offspring along, applying what one California psychologist termed the "He'll-clean-up-his-room-when-he's-ready-to-have-a-clean-room" philosophy.32
In training, confidence, and sheer time spent changing bedsheets, no generation of American women can match the Greatest for the intensity of the nurture they provided their mostly Boom children. Thanks to greater affluence, declines in adult mortality, and so many stay-at-home mothers, Boomer children enjoyed the most secure family life in American history. As Greatest dads commuted to work, Greatest moms invested endless time and energy to Boomer children. Susan Littwin recalled how "being a parent was a career; and like any career, the harder you worked, the more you gained." Few Boomer preschoolers had working mothers--and among those who did, four in five were cared for in their own homes, usually by relatives. Only 2 percent attended institutional day care.33
The high standards of Greatest science bolstered public education. First-wave Boomers passed through public schools in their Sputnik-era peak of institutional confidence, thanks in part to a powerful mutual support between Greatest mothers and teachers. Boomers were taught by the brightest of Greatest women, to whom most other professions were closed. Spurred by the Soviet Sputnik launch, taxpayers seldom refused pleas to build and equip new schools. Greatest motives weren't just geopolitical: Many Boomers recall parents telling them how hard adults were working to build a prosperous and secure country in which kids could grow up asking the big questions about the meaning of life--and maybe even coming up with some answers.34
The most important (and scientific) new nurturing device was television. From the mid-1940s to mid-1950s, the average daily hours a household spent watching TV rose from 0 to 4.5. Boomer kids digested a black-and-white parade of simple plots full of competent parents, smart scientists, honest leaders, and happy endings. In comics and on TV and movie screens, children were depicted as rambunctious Dennis the Menaces, as kids whose Shaggy Dog curiosity got the better of them, or as mystery-solving masters of loyal Lassie animals. Like Ward Cleaver, TV grownups would usually Leave It to Beaver, letting kids learn from their own mistakes in a world that smiled on childlike error. Kids couldn't help but notice how attentive adults were to whatever happened to be on their minds. As the buoyant Art Linkletter put it, "Kids say the darnedest things." Anything of interest to children keenly absorbed older people. Earlier in the Twentieth Century, says Landon Jones, "it would have been impossible to imagine the under-ten group starting anything. . . . But the fads of the fifties, almost without exception, were the creation of children." From Mickey Mouse ears and Davy Crockett caps to hula hoops, Silly Putty, Slinky, and Barbie, Boomers became the first child generation to be target marketed by advertising agencies. Toward the end of the American High, pleasing teenagers became a very important goal for a nation that, in the recent crisis of Great Depression and World War II, had shown scant interest in Silent Generation adolescence.35
Many a child's life did indeed match the Happy Days image preserved in vintage television sit-coms. To the eye of a Boomer kid, any problem seemed fixable by adults, especially once those white-coated scientists came on the scene. To youths like Cheryl Merser, "somebody was always watching over them--God or a saint or a guardian angel or the stars or whatever," and the future looked to be "the way life was on The Jetsons--happy, easy, uncomplicated, prosperous."36
At home, Greatest dads who upheld the strict male role model often felt out of place. A best-selling book advised parents to "eternally give to your children. Otherwise you are not a loving parent." Visiting Europeans joked about how strictly adult Americans obeyed their offspring.37
Spock emphasized the "mother-child bond," arguing that "creative" individuals owed their success to "the inspiration they received from a particularly strong relationship with a mother who had especially high aspirations for her children."38
In his interviews with undergraduate male activists in the late 1960s, Keniston encountered "an unusually strong tie between these young men and their mothers in the first years of life." In 1970, one poll found 32 percent of white Boomers (44 percent of blacks) mentioning their mothers alone as "the one person who cares about me." Only 8 percent of whites (2 percent of blacks) gave the same response about their fathers. A year later, Greatest author Philip Wylie labeled the Boom The Sons and Daughters of Mom.39
Midlife Greatest men placed a huge emphasis on fixing the physical environment to improve the child's world. Untended nature was the enemy. Bottles were preferred to breast milk, making Boomers the least breast-fed generation in American history. Greatest scientists conquered such once-terrible childhood diseases as diptheria and polio, and they fluoridated the water to protect kids' teeth. Pediatrics reached its height of physical aggressiveness: No generation of kids ever got more shots or had more operations, including millions of circumcisions and tonsillectomies that would not now be performed.40
To most middle-class youths, poverty, disease, and crime were invisible--or were, at most, temporary nuisances that would soon succumb to the inexorable advance of affluence. At no other time in the Twentieth Century did the mainstream culture impart such a benign worldview to children, seldom requiring them to prepare for painful challenges or tragic outcomes. Watching the TV game Truth of Consequences, kids realized that the truth brought payoffs and the consequences were jokes. With life so free of danger, kids felt free to cultivate strong inner lives.41
Boomer kids were made to feel welcome not just by their own parents, but also by their communities. They became the targets of libraries, recreation centers, and other civic entities that had during the crisis of depression and war been the domain of working adults (or, today, of recreating seniors). Surrounded by such open-handed generosity, child Boomers developed what Daniel Yankelovich termed the "psychology of entitlement." Landon Jones recalls how "what other generations have thought privileges, Boomers thought were rights."42
Throughout the American High, the feed-on-demand Boomer spirit remained sunny. A 1960 study found kids aged nine to thirteen possessed of very positive sentiments toward the adult world. Robert Samuelson remembers reaching adolescence in "a period of high optimism when people believed that technology and society's best minds could guarantee social improvement."43
As successive youth cohorts passed through childhood, the adult nurturing style leaned ever more toward tolerance than guidance, and parents began second-guessing the sacrifices they were making for the sake of their kids. Meanwhile, the adolescent environment darkened. From sex to politics, circa-1970 campus behavior swiftly filtered down to kids in high school, even junior high. By now reflecting a Silent Generation ethos, public schools began losing the old Greatest mom-to-teacher peer support system. Reform-minded educators began insisting that adults had as much to learn from youths as vice versa. The curricula stressed learning skills over subject matter, social relevance over timeless facts. New student "rights" were litigated, and old extracurricular activities atrophied.44
The seventeen-year SAT slide spanned nearly the entire Boom, from the 1946 cohort to the 1963 (Generation X) cohort--yet the worst years of that slide coincided with the greatest grade inflation ever measured. In 1969, 4 percent of college freshmen claimed to have had a straight-A high school grade average; by 1978, that proportion had nearly tripled, to 11 percent. From 1969 to 1975, the average collegiate grade rose from a C+ to a B. By 1971, three-fourths of all colleges offered alternatives to traditional marking systems.45
Adolescent boy-girl coupling became increasingly tentative and individualized; where the Silent had gone "steady," Boomers went "with" someone. Popular song lyrics gradually shifted from Silentish styles (today remembered as "light" rock) to the more Boom-driven pessimism and defiance associated with "hard" (or "acid") rock. The Silent-era couples-only Saturday-night dance nearly vanished, eclipsed by rock concerts at which dateless teenagers could dance the night away all by themselves if they wanted. The first Boomer cohorts came of sexual age with the Beatles' I Wanna Hold Your Hand, middle cohorts with the Rolling Stones' Let's Spend the Night Together, late cohorts with Bruce Springsteen's Dancing in the Dark. Yet, whether first-wavers asserting a creative role in an idealized future or last-wavers attempting a more defiant withdrawal from the world, adolescents looked within themselves to find solutions to life's problems.46
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