Baby Busters

Baby Busters is a name for a demographic group born in the United States, and sometimes Canada, from 1958 through 1968. They are called this due to a decline in the birth rate; specifically, the U.S. birth rate fell for eleven consecutive years after 1957, the longest such decline in American history. The name is intended to contrast with the term "Baby Boomer"; indeed, the central purpose of its usage appears to be to deny Boomer affiliation on behalf of those born from 1958 through 1964, thus rejecting the mass media's widespread practice of observing 1960 or even 1964 as the baby boom's cutoff date. Approximately 43 million people were born in the United States during the years of the actual "bust;" adding immigrants and subtracting deaths of those born during this period, it is believed that about 41 million persons born during these years were alive in the United States as of the end of 2003.

Related Topics:
Demographic - United States - Canada - 1958 - 1968 - 1957 - Baby Boomer - 1964 - Mass media - 1960 - Baby boom - 2003

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The first identification of baby busters in this context appears to have been made by anthropologist Marvin Harris (1927-2001) in his 1981 book America Now (later re-released under the title '). In 1987, the word twentysomething was coined, an apparent back-formation of Thirtysomething, the title of a then-popular Baby Boomer-themed television series. Douglas Coupland's groundbreaking 1991 novel ' was dedicated to "the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s," and in the following year's Presidential election the "under-35 generation" was frequently cited as the core supporters of third-party candidate Ross Perot. In his 2001 book, The Isolation Generation, Dean Anderson identifies a generation labeled the Pre-Lunar Space-Agers as having been born between the launch of Sputnik (October 4, 1957) and the Apollo 11 moon landing (July 20, 1969), thus making 1958 through 1968 the group's full birth years.

Related Topics:
Marvin Harris - 1927 - 2001 - 1981 - America Now - 1987 - Thirtysomething - Douglas Coupland - 1991 - 1950s - 1960s - Ross Perot - The Isolation Generation - Dean Anderson - Sputnik - October 4 - 1957 - Apollo 11 - July 20 - 1969

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The psychographic position of the Baby Busters and how they relate to neighboring generations has been the subject of considerable debate. Some insist that they constitute an entirely separate group, between the Baby Boomers and Generation X, while others reckon them as an older subset of Generation X. The combination of the aforementioned dedication of Douglas Coupland's novel followed by the media obsession with "twentysomethings" that persisted well into the 1990s has only served to heighten the confusion.

Related Topics:
Baby Boomers - Generation X - Douglas Coupland - Media - 1990s

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Another popular description of Baby Busters includes the span of birth years 1965 - 1976 in the US. These years mark the end of the Baby Boom (1964, beginning in 1946) and beginning of the Echo Baby Boom (1977, ending in 1994 and sometimes known as "Generation Y"), the children of the Baby Boomers. As plotted against a normal distribution curve, the Baby Boom had it's apex in 1957, and was proceeded with a decline in births but were still a relative large number of births. The US Census Bureau defines the dearth in births from 1965 to 1976 in terms of demographic birth cohorts as the Baby Bust.

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