Demographics: Baby Boom/Generaton X
North Americans born between 1945 and 1963 are all referred to as the Baby Boomers. During this time period or 75 million babies were born in the U.S alone. After WWII the birth rate in North America was on the rise. Growing Families created growing and expanding markets for new housing, automobiles as well as many other products such as toys, food and of course the wonderous television. Baby Boomers were the first generation in history to be raised in front of the television. The drastic increase in population completely changed the social and economic make-up of North America within a span of about eighteen years. But in the late seventies things began to change. Generation X accounts for those born between 1964 and 1981, these are the sons and daughters of the Boomers and after the social revolution of the sixties fewer and fewer adults were willing to start families of their own. This led to the Baby Bust of the seventies. Some Xers are worried that slow growth and the aging Boomers will greatly once again reshape the population and economy in a negative way. However this is not necessarily a reasonable assumption for the future, Generation X should not simply aid their worries but instead review
In North America as an individual your share of the economic pie is determined by the outcomes of capitalism and democracy. For the aging Baby Boom Generation the size of what the will collect depends on the wealth its members have accumulated with their pension claims, public policies and also how much the economy grew during their working years. So while Boomers came into the world with nothing, on their way out they will have a few trillion in pension funds and real estate to help pay the freight. Although by the late seventies sixty-six percent of American adults surveyed agreed with the statement "parents should be free to live their own lives even if it means spending less time with their children." Nancy Friday in her 1977 best seller, My mother/My Self found an audience when she promised "If a mother has a life of her own, the daughter will love her more, will want to be around her more." Many adopted this theory and other variations of it, reassuring young adults that it is possible to be a good parent as well as posses one's own individual and personal identity. the past and how the Baby Boomers coped with their own fertility problems. Another question concerning Generation Xers is the fact that the number of Baby Boomers greatly out numbers the amount of Xers. This is a result of the great baby bust which took place in the seventies. If you think of all those old films created during the seventies, the story is never centered around a young beautiful couple expecting a child. Instead popular movies of the time were Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, Alive and of course the ever famous The Exorcist. All of these movies portrayed the children's characters as the antichrist, possessed and monsters. Television programs such as Three's Company, The Jeffersons and The Mary Tyler Moore Show all present childless characters. With millions of Generation X women entering their peak fertility years scientists and statisticians expected another boom but instead the number of births dropped dramatically. Fewer babies were born in 1971 than in 1970 and fewer in 1972 than in 1971 and so on until 1974 when only 3.1 million babies were born. Over 16 hospitals in New York City alone had to close their maternity wards in the early 70s. The total U.S birth rate plunged to the lowest level since the 1930s. Usually birth rates decrease when a state or nation is in economically troubled times, but
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Approximate Word count = 1644
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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