A Boomer writes . . .

OCTOBER 1961 was a defining month. Julia Childs wrote her first cookbook, Private Eye appeared and the Soviet Union exploded the largest nuclear bomb ever. Parliament here abolished the death penalty and by month’s end, a record 5338 babies had been born. One of them, on the last day of the month, was one Peter Robert Jackson.

Baby Boomers make a difference.

Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) defines the baby boom as the period between 1946 and 1965 – that is people now aged between 47 and 66. In that space, created after thousands of soldiers returned home from World War II, babies were born at a rate never seen before. 1961 was the biggest year – 65,000 babies and the Pakeha fertility rate was 3.5 births per woman; it was almost seven for Maori.

The population was just 2.5 million then; today we average

around 5000 births a month with nearly twice the population with a two births per woman fertility rate.

The introduction in 1961 of the oral contraceptive pill ended the boom, but the cohort continues to dominate in a way no other group yet does. In June there were 1,310,550 Boomers.

The biggest group, 313,180 are 45 to 49 years old followed by 305,400 in the Jackson group – 50 to 54 year olds. The oldest of the boomers, 65 to 69, total 190,950.

Baby Boomers lost 450,000 people in emigration out of New Zealand, while the next generation, Gen X between 1963 and 1980 – 32 to 49 – gained from a big immigration input.

Today both cohorts are roughly the same size.

Way back when I was a cadet reporter on Wellington’s Evening Post (and Jackson was working downstairs in the linotype department), our elders were completely different.

One of our seniors was minus an eye – a Guadalcanal wound. Another had post traumatic stress from duty on Murmansk convoys. The bloke who decided where our stories went had flown bombers over Germany.

The dominant generation then had experienced war and the older ones had memories of the Great Depression. They had fought for the country and came with a strong sense of entitlement – a right to free education, subsidised private housing and cheap milk.

SNZ says the boom, which was replicated in the United States but did not occur with quite the same punch elsewhere, came as a result of the marriage boom as soldiers came home.

A third of the brides had their first child within a year.

It wasn’t so much oppressive but these men wanted quiet weekends with the shops closed and veneration of the RSA and Anzac Day.

Prime Minister Rob Muldoon has gone to the war; his successor David Lange, born in 1942, was not strictly a Boomer but Helen Clark and Jenny Shipley were.

Boomers put them in office and demanded change.

A Ministry of Economic Development paper says Baby Boomers deserve their distinct recognition because they encountered ‘‘enormous change, increasing diversity in family forms and experiences, and a rapidly decreasing average family size’’. Marriage rates were lower than they had been for the parents’ generation, and divorce rates increased. Stepfamilies increased and the later in the baby-boom era people were born, the more likely they were to have been single parents.

‘‘For the Baby-Boom generation, the pace of change during postwar years was startling, particularly regarding the expectations and norms about family formation, the use of contraception and having children,’’ MED says.

SNZ says Baby Boomers ‘‘redefined the norms at every stage of the life cycle so far and they will also diversify the social, economic and demographic characteristics of the empty nest syndrome’’.

They warn the spirit of change that has dominated Baby Boomers’ lives, may well continue on into their older years.