Age Distribution

The American population continues to grow older, with the median age exceeding 40 in many states and the number of older men, in particular, increasing. Age data has been well tracked over American history: it is one of the few pieces of information, along with sex, that was asked in the original 1790 census and has been asked on every census since. In the 2010 census, age data was derived from two questions: the age of the person, and the date of birth, with instructions to list babies as 0 years old if they were less than 1 year old. These instructions were added as of the 2010 census in order to reduce reporting problems for babies, whose respondents often listed their ages in terms of days, weeks, or months. Age information is used to implement and evaluate programs like the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Women's Educational Equity Act, the Older Americans Act, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, and the Job Training Partnership Act, as well as by the policy-making and service development bodies of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of the Interior, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

American age groups are sometimes discussed in terms of specific generations or cohorts: it makes more sense to talk about trends common to the Baby Boomers, for instance, who were born during a population growth spike following the end of World War II, than it does to talk about the trends common to a specific age group, given the expectation that behaviors and trends will “follow” the Boomers as they age out of one group and into the next. The Depression generation, for instance, experienced the peak of European immigration, two world wars, and the Great Depression, and grew up in a time when Americanization and acculturation were stressed; they have often retained certain attitudes and behaviors shaped by these experiences. All generational boundaries being fuzzy, they overlap with “the Greatest Generation,” a term popularized by television journalist Tom Brokaw, who wrote about the generation that fought World War II and subsequently established mainstream mid-century American culture. Many of them were also active in the civil rights movement.

Some call the next generation the Silent Generation, those born at one of the lowest birthrate periods in American history, from the Great Depression through World War II. They grew up during the peak of jazz music, the early days of rock and roll, the paranoia of anticommunist McCarthyism, the beginnings of the Cold War, and the beginnings of the drug culture, and tend toward social conservatism. The Baby Boomer generation followed, with the generational boundaries defined variously by different sociologists and historians, but accounting for the sizable increase in birthrate following World War II, both as a result of soldiers returning home and because of the return of American prosperity. Baby Boomers, one of the largest generations in American history, were active in the civil rights movement and the subsequent social-political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, mainstreamed the environmental movement, and popularized social cause involvement, spiritualism and alternative lifestyles, tolerance and individualism, feminism, and social improvements through government [Page 8]programs, such as Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty program. Many minority Baby Boomers were responsible for the early growth of ethnic and racial identity groups like the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, and the Chicano movement. The Asian American movement developed slightly later.

...