1984 - Essay 7

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      The Baby Boomers were from different backgrounds   and were raised in different circumstances. The things they have in common are the times that they were born. In the fifties they were children, they were teenagers in the sixties and they were reaching adulthood at some point in the seventies. After years of war, the Great Depression over things were finally good in the United States. After all of the hard times people were finding jobs, getting homes and starting to raise families. The men in the military were coming home so everyone who had been putting off having families, for various reasons, were now starting their families. There was a child born every eight seconds for eighteen years.(Croker, 8) There were about seventy-eight million people born in the eighteen years of the baby boom.
    The parents of the Baby Boomers were following a new trend   in child rearing the most important thing was that the child felt loved. The leading authority at the time was Dr. Benjamin Spock. He felt that reasoning with a child and not punishing the child was the way to raise children. He taught the parents of the generation that the child’s happiness was the most important thing. Later in the paper you will see some of the Baby Boomer children as adults and see where this my have had tremendous influence on these boomers as adults. This lead to permissive behavior according to some. The early years of the baby boom generation had nurturing mothers, a more economically secure childhood and television! In 1948 there were about 177,000 televisions and by 1952 there were over 15 million televisions in America.(Croker, 18). These children grew up watching television and watching Saturday morning cartoons. The baby boomer generation did not know of life without TV. This may be what lead to this generations work in the television industry. Rob   Reiner is one boomer who eventually had a career in TV. While watching TV these Baby Boomers grew up thinking that any...