Since there have been quite a few comments on the Generations discussion, I thought it might help to expand the discussion in another post. First, some definitions. People disagree as to the exact lines between generations, and pinning down exact years is difficult. It is also quite possible that in such a format as this, people will argue ad infinitum about when a generation begins and ends, who their children are, etc., etc. Generations, after all, are not defined only chronologically but also by the events and times through which they lived.
So I'll offer this scale of American generations. The World War II generation constitutes people born between about 1910 and 1926; those who were old enough to serve, for men. For women, those birth dates put them about at the right age to work in a munitions plant, doing difficult industrial labor.
Boomers are typically the children of the World War II generation. The term baby boomer, after all, refers to the population explosion that occurred during the post-war period and was at least in part the result of G.I.s returning home from service. They were born, about, between the years of 1946, and I would argue, until about 1959 or even 1960. Members of this generation were not necessarily, "hippies," a media invention that constitutes a less than apt term. People describing themselves as "hippies" were probably not actually the kind of person many think of when the think of the Sixties generation, or Sixties people, or Sixties this, that, or the other. The Baby Boomer generation was divided, to put it as simply as possible, between Freaks and Straights.
Baby boomers who actively participated in counter-cultural activities, such as drug use or political activism, were Freaks. They were, as Nixon put it, "a small vocal minority." Their numbers were extremely small. The vast majority of boomers were not these so-called hippies, again, a media invention term, but wore their hair short, abstained from drug use (until marijuana became largely acceptable in the early Seventies), heckeled, and spit on anti-war protesters. They were Straights. They, as the vast majority of baby boomers, did not burn their draft cards, but either served or received college deferments. But most Boomers did not publicly oppose or protest the war. In sum, perhaps 1 out of 100 members of the Boomer generation actually participated in 1960s counter-culture.
The members of Gen X, mostly, fell between the Boomers and their children, about between the years of 1960/1 and 1977. The children of Boomers, particularly those who are white and middle class, as Gen Y, or Echo Boomers or whatever you want to call them, followed in the years after 1977. Thus, a person born in 1955, say a white middle-class Boomer, would be having children between about 1977 and up to 1990. Therefore, Gen Y can most certainly be the children of Boomers. Like to go further back? A person born at the start of the Boom in 1947, also white and middle-class, could, and many did, have children in the second half of the 1960s. Now this would place those children in Gen X. But think about it. A person born in 1947 could also be having children until 1982, if not later, placing those children within Gen Y.
It's not a perfect delineation, and I never said it was. There are exceptions. There is overlap. Generations do not act as a single unit. They are not monolithic. Quite the contrary. Perhaps more posts will follow on this subject, but I'll throw these definitions open to debate for now.
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