Baby Boomer - Definition

Definition

The phrase baby boom has been used since the late nineteenth century to refer to a noticeable temporary increase in the birth rate. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of "baby boomer" is from 1970 in an article in the Washington Post.

Various authors have delimited the baby boom period differently. The United States Census Bureau considers a baby boomer to be someone born during the demographic birth boom between 1946 and 1964. Landon Jones, in his book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (1980), defined the span of the baby-boom generation as extending from 1943 through 1960, when annual births increased over 4,000,000. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, well known for their generational theory, define the social generation of Boomers as the cohorts born from 1943 to 1960, who were too young to have any personal memory of World War II, but old enough to remember the postwar American High.

The generation can be segmented into two broadly defined cohorts. The Leading-Edge Baby Boomers are individuals born between 1946 and 1955, those who came of age during the Vietnam War era. This group represents slightly more than half of the generation, or roughly 38,002,000 people of all races. The other half of the generation was born between 1956 and 1964. Called Late Boomers, or Trailing-Edge Boomers, this second cohort includes about 37,818,000 individuals, according to Live Births by Age and Mother and Race, 1933–98, published by the Center for Disease Control's National Center for Health Statistics.

An ongoing battle for "generational ownership" has motivated a handful of marketing mavens and cultural commentators to coin and/or promote their own terms for sub‑segments of the baby-boomer generation. These monikers include, but are not limited to, "golden boomers", "generation Jones", "alpha boomers", "yuppies", "zoomers", and "cuspers". Advocates of these "cultural segments" are often zealous and overstated in their attempts to redefine generational boundaries, often claiming wide adoption and sometimes advancing self-promotional agendas.

In Ontario, Canada, one attempt to define the boom came from David Foot, author of Boom, Bust and Echo: Profiting from the Demographic Shift in the 21st entury, published in 1997 and 2000. He defines a Canadian boomer as someone born from 1947 to 1966, the years that more than 400,000 babies were born. However, he acknowledges that is a demographic definition, and that culturally it may not be as clear-cut.

Doug Owram argues that the Canadian boom took place from 1943 to 1960, but that culturally boomers (everywhere) were born between the late war years and about 1955 or 1956. He notes that those born in the years before the actual boom were often the most influential people among boomers; for example, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones to and writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who were considerably older than the boomer generation. Those born in the 1960s might feel disconnected from the cultural identifiers of the earlier boomers.

Bernard Salt places the Australian baby boom between 1943 and 1960.

Another definition for the Baby Boom is the decade after the Second World War, that is 1946 to 1955.