Baby Boomers U. S. (The Blog)

The Baby Boomers from a Generation Y Perspective

Posted: 25 Sep 2011 04:09 AM PDT

This is a Guest Post by Marie Owens, Law student and Gen-Y’er. If you would like to Guest Post for Baby Boomers US, please visit our Guest Post for Us page.

Generation Y is big business. There are 80 million of them in the United States alone, and they wield a great deal of influence. However, these young people are the products of a very different generation, the Baby Boomers, who came of age in the ’60s and ’70s. How do they feel their parents’ generation measures up? For that matter, what contributions do they feel the older generation has made to the world? To understand the relationship between Generation Y and the Baby Boomers, it’s essential to answer these questions and examine the intergenerational relationship in its social context. Only by doing so is it possible to separate the facts of Gen Y’s relationship with the older generation from the myths.

Understanding the Generations

To best grasp how Baby Boomers and their children interact, it’s important to ground any generalizations about them in solid social theory. One of the most influential ideas, the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory states that the first 30 years of life, or roughly the years that encompass childhood and young adulthood, are the most influential in establishing a person’s outlooks and beliefs. Because members of the same generation will share similar experiences and social mores, they tend to exhibit a general range of shared characteristics.

According to the Strauss-Howe theory, there is a cycle of four distinct archetypes that can define generations: prophets, who are born after a crisis and focus on self-awakening and morality; nomads, who are born during the awakening and become pragmatic realists; heroes, who are born after an awakening and are confident and protective; and artists, who are born during a crisis and focus on consensus-building. Baby Boomers are members of a prophet generation, and their so-called millennial or Generation Y children are a hero generation.

The arrival of each generational archetype is preceded by certain social events called turnings that follow a predetermined pattern and last approximately 20 years, or a generational length. The high, or first turning is a post-crisis era, and it encompasses the young adults of the Greatest Generation, those who came of age during the late 1930s and early 1940s. The awakening of the ’60s and ’70s is the turning which defines Baby Boomers, characterized by attacks on institutionalism in favor of spiritual freedom and individualism. Generation X belongs to the turning known as the unraveling, a time of weak institutions and strong individualism, while the crisis or fourth turning, to which Generation Y belongs, is characterized by the rebuilding of institutions and community purpose.

Why are Baby Boomers and Generation Y so important?

Currently, the prophetic Baby Boomers are approximately 76 million members strong. Between the Boomers and the 80-some million Gen Y’ers, these two generations represent the lion’s share of the US population, and therefore hold a great deal of influence over American social dynamics. In particular, it’s essential to see how Generation Y and Baby Boomers tend to understand and often misunderstand each other in order to grasp the broader relationship between these two dominant generations.

The primary point of conflict between Baby Boomers and Gen Y is the fact that the former are continuing to work past traditional retirement age. This is holding Generation X back from professional advancement, a trend that continues to trickle down to Generation Y. Meanwhile, Baby Boomers’ management style and Generation Y’s tendency to organizational fervor often conflict.

How Generation Y Views Baby Boomers

It might be surprising to learn that overall Baby Boomers are viewed favorably by the younger generation. Conflicts about retirement age and promotions aside, Generation Y and even Generation X view Baby Boomers with a certain respect and awe. These are the individuals who developed home computers and the Internet. They fought in the Civil Rights Movement and partied at Woodstock. Thanks to Boomer activism, feminism gained a foothold and government corruption a la the Watergate scandal was recognized as something to be reviled. Their creativity is responsible for a slough of new careers, such as paralegal assistants and videogame designers. In fact, Generation Y knows that much of the lifestyle they now enjoy is thanks to the Baby Boomers who came before them.

According to economist Sylvia Hewlett, Generation Y and the Baby Boomers actually have a great deal in common, partly because of the social changes for which Baby Boomers fought. She discusses how work styles, goals, and even likes and dislikes have shaped these two generations in similar ways. Primarily, Hewlett points out, far from being motivated by money both groups are driven by the idea of life as a journey. The protests and social movements of the ’60s and ’70s have given rise to quieter movements such as Facebook groups that support a particular cause. Nevertheless, the two generations share the belief that life isn’t only about money or even family, but about social change and looking beyond one’s own small neighborhood.

Although plenty of coverage discusses conflicts and differences between Gen Y and Baby Boomers, it’s important to note that such conflict is of the kind typical between parents and children. As the Baby Boomers’ children, Generation Y understands that they have reaped the benefits of the Boomers’ technological advances and interest in individualism. By the same token, although current revolutions in technology, particularly social media, are being driven by Generation Y, Baby Boomers are also quick to jump on board. Indeed, these two generations do coexist peacefully most of the time, and with a continued effort to understand what shapes each, it’s more than possible for them to work effectively side by side.

Marie Owens: As a prospective law student in Washington state, Marie Owens is particularly interested in criminal law and gender issues. She writes to promote criminal justice education, and teaches martial arts in her spare time.

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