Post-World War II baby boom
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As is often the case with a big war, after the end of World War II many countries around the globe, notably those of Europe, Asia, North America, and Australasia experienced a baby boom. The Baby Boom was brought to the publics attention in 1960, with the publication of Landon Y. Jones' Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation. The presence of a boom was not denied. Live births in the United States surged from 222,721 in January 1946 to 233,452 that May. In October, 339,499 babies were born. By the end of the decade, about 32 million babies had been born, compared with 24 million in the lean 1930s. In 1954, annual births first topped four million and did not drop below that figure until 1965, when four out of ten Americans were under the age of twenty[1].
Contents |
[edit] Causes
Prior to the Baby Boom, there was a time period of approximately 20 years in which having children would have been difficult due to World War II and the Great Depression. The Baby Boom reflected the sudden removal of economic and social pressures that kept people from starting families.[2]
 |
This section is a stub. You can help by expanding it. |
[edit] In the United States
In the United States, the Arsenal of Democracy switched gears and started cranking out goods and materials for export to war-ravaged Europe. As America supplied the "free world" with goods to rebuild their own economies, the country experienced an unprecedented bubble of vigorous economic growth that didn't slow until 1958. Furthermore, in the U.S. the G.I. Bill enabled record numbers of people to attend college and obtain, perhaps in most cases, the first college degree in their extended families. This led to an increase in education and granted higher incomes to families allowing them the resources to produce more children.
There is little agreement as to the exact beginning and end of the baby boom. In the United States, demographers have put the generation's birth years at 1946 to 1964, despite the fact that the U.S. birthrate (per 1,000 population) 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 and exclude those born in the final years of the demographic "boom", putting the generation's birth years at 1943 to 1960. Because Strauss and Howe base their years on peer personality, not parental fecundity, their years do not coincide with the actual demographic "boom".
The key biological factor is that a woman is fertile only into her mid-forties, and while austerity and restraint were the norms during the stress of the war years in the lives of the various Rosie the Riveters, when the men came home many of those left their jobs and marriage became again a cultural and career norm for most women — and one result was babies, which boom continued in the economic glow of the fifties, but dampened its rate as the recession of 1958 sloughed into the following recovery, but petered out as the biological capacity of the boomer parents took their natural course. Simple mathematics governs, a woman married in her mid-to-late twenties after the war ended in August 1945 was infertile twenty-or-so years later. Finer distinctions are statistical, although there is merit in the cultural view of Strauss and Howe, based in the cultural commonalities experienced by the boomers as they have defined them.
However, although there was an increase in resident population in 1946 and 1947, it produced only a modest increase making up for the loss during World War II. The end of World War II also ended the long depression for the US that started in 1929. By 1948 the US population increase was back to the pre-recession increase rate of about 1.5% per year.
Based on US census information[1]:
- US Involvement in World War II (+ 5 post "boomer" years)
- --------US Resident----Net-----------Percent
- Year---Population-----change--------change
- 1941---1,133,121--------1,123,167------------0.88
- 1942---133,920----------799------------0.60
- 1943---134,245----------325------------0.24
- 1944---132,885-------(1,360)----------(1.01)
- 1945---132,481---------(404)----------(0.30)
- 1946---140,054--------7,573------------5.72
- 1947---143,446--------3,392------------2.42
- 1948---146,093--------2,647------------1.85
- 1949---148,665--------2,572------------1.76
- 1950---151,868--------3,203------------2.15
- 10 year average-------1,991------------1.43
The five percent "baby boom" increase of 1946 and the trickle into 1947 barely impacted the US population growth rate between 1900 and 2004.
[edit] In Canada
In Canada, the baby boom is usually defined as the generation born from 1946 to 1966—Canadian soldiers were repatriated later than American servicemen, and Canada's birthrate did not start to rise until 1947, and most Canadian demographers prefer to use the later date of 1966 as the boom's end in that country.
[edit] In the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom experienced a second baby boom during the 1960s, with a peak in births in 1964 and a third (smaller) one in the late 1980s. The two peaks can clearly be seen in the UK population pyramids.[3]
[edit] European and South-Pacific trends
Many European countries, Australia and New Zealand also experienced a baby boom. In some cases, total fertility rate almost doubled. The American birth model, conceived by demographer Frank Notestein, was punctuated by an end to the upsurge in births and a return to pre-war levels. Prior to WWII, fertility rates in Europe and America were on a general decline due to improved nutrition and medicine, and a surge in births were previously not experienced at such a large scale. Based this model, baby boom years for other countries regarded for having a baby boom are as follows:
- France 1946-1974
- United Kingdom 1946-1971
- Finland 1945-1951
- Sweden 1946-1952
- Denmark 1946-1950
- Netherlands 1946-1972
- Ireland 1946-1982
- Iceland 1946-1969
- New Zealand 1946-1965
- Australia 1946-1965
In some of these examples, an "echo boom" followed some time after as the large cohort gave rise to another large population of offspring, with a baby "bust" in between. The birth years of the baby boom as noted being both short and long lived, creates what many believe to be a myth to the notion of defining baby boomers as one "generation", as a unified concept is clearly not possible. Indeed, multiple generations may be present in a single country such as Ireland where the boom lasted 36 years. This overlapping effect of generations is not illuminated when considering crude fertility rates. The only common ground for the collective boom is the same approximate starting year. This example can be applied to each state in the United States on an individual basis. The states with a census in place saw fertility rates drop to pre-war levels throughout the 1960s, with the average being in 1964.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ Figures in Landon Y. Jones, "Swinging 60s?" in Smithsonian Magazine, January 2006, pp 102–107.
- ^ Comparisons of 20th Century U.S. Population Growth by Decade. Retrieved on February 3, 2007.
- ^ UK population pyramids.
