Baby Boom

The Baby Boom refers to the period from 1946 to 1961—the largest population explosion in U.S. history. This rise in births is attributable primarily to the return of more than 15 million servicemen and women to civilian life after World War II. The immediate consequences were a rise in the marriage rate, a rise in the birthrate (the Baby Boom), and the subsequent purchasing of homes in the suburbs (home ownership doubled between 1940 and 1960). The “Baby Boomers” (the name bestowed on this larger-than-average generation of youth) generated many social changes, including a rise sexual experimentation, a commitment to civil rights, the rock ’n roll revolution, the Peace Corps, the anti–Vietnam War movement, the women's movement, and the conservative backlash of the 1970s and 1980s. As the Baby Boomers started to raise their own families, they created a slightly smaller baby boom in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the early 21st century, concern has grown about the ability of the current social security system to provide [Page 68]adequate retirement benefits to the Baby Boomers when they start to retire after 2012.

Statistics on the Baby Boom and the surrounding years clearly show the spike in number of births immediately after the end of World War II, and the gradual increase in the years after.

The unintended demographic consequences of the drafting of millions of men during World War II had some limited precursors. First, a baby boom of sorts occurred in the aftermath of the Civil War, when more than one million men returned to their wives and sweethearts after two or more years of separation. In addition, after the war, slaves secured the right to form legally recognized marriages and raise children without fear of their being sold upon the death of debt-ridden owners. (A baby boom did not occur after World War I, nor after the Korean or the Vietnam wars, likely because partners typically were separated for less than two years.) Second, draft legislation passed prior to U.S. entry into World War II led to a pre-Baby Boom increase in birth rates. When Congress passed the first peacetime draft of young men in May 1940, it exempted married men (among others); in the next month the nation experienced a “marriage boom.” In September, Congress amended the legislation to provide exemptions only for married men with children; nine months later a significant rise in births produced the first “baby boom” of the 1940s. (Hauser, 312).

However, the postwar rise in births was clearly the largest of its kind and surpassed earlier increases. The average age at marriage for women fell from 21.5 in 1940 to 20.1 by 1956. The percentage of unmarried women fell from 28 percent in 1940 to a 20th-century low of 19 percent by 1959. In 1940, recorded births reached 2,360,000; in 1946, the figure was 3,289,000. The numbers rose almost steadily to a peak of 4,255,000 births in 1957.

The federal government made raising families more affordable for poor veterans and their spouses. As many of the millions drafted for the war were of modest means, Congress provided the U.S. Children's Bureau with funds for Emergency Maternal and Infant Care between 1943 and 1949, which covered all those in the service whose enlisted ratings were at the lower end of the pay scale (EM-1 through EM-4). These funds reached one in every seven childbearing women. For other American couples, a measure of postwar prosperity inspired confidence in the future: the gross national product doubled and the average income of Americans tripled between 1940 and 1955 (Jones, 21). Others may have found the decision to have children less difficult after reading Dr. Benjamin Spock's best-seller, Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, which assured prospective parents that the process was much less daunting than had been portrayed by previous authors of manuals, such as John B. Watson's Psychological Care of Infant and Child (1928). Spock's manual, which appeared at the very onset of the Baby Boom in 1946, sold 12 million copies by 1960, outselling every book but the Bible.

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