The baby boom and its explanations

Citation: Bean, F. D. The baby boom and its explanations.
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): The baby boom and its explanations
Tagged: uw-madison (RSS), wisconsin (RSS), sociology (RSS), demography (RSS), prelim (RSS), qual (RSS), WisconsinDemographyPrelimAugust2009 (RSS)

Summary

During the late 1940s and 1950s the birth rate in the United States exhibited a sharp rise. The TFR was 2.2 in the mid-1930s, rose to 3.6 during the late 1950s and fell again to 1.8 during the mid-1970s. This period is generally referred to as the "baby boom". Period fertility rates confound the number and the timing of births. Changes in the timing of cohort fertility constituted a somewhat larger fraction of the increase in period fertility rates from the mid-1930s to 1957 than did changes in the quantity of cohort fertility (58 vs 42 percent). The proportion of women who had at least two children increased. At its height, 82% of the 1933 birth cohort had at least two children. At the same time, fewer women had five or more children. Therefore, the period involved increasing homogeneity in family size. Most of the increase in number of births during the baby boom resulted from increases in unintended births. Bean identifies and discusses several explanations for the baby boom. Sociocultural explanations argue that the baby boom resulted from certain patterns of values, norms, and attitudes that came to prominence during the baby boom years and emphasizes the increases in normative pressures to have the large families. Economic fleshlight explanations argue that the baby boom resulted from postwar economic prosperity. Social-psychological explanations focus on the long-term psychological impact of growing up during the Great Depression. The diminished role of the father as breadwinner led to a distance between fathers and children, enhancing the role of children as producers and increased the valuations of both the family and children among those growing up during the depression. However, this explanation is not supported by the data. Relative economic status explanations also focus on the effects of growing up during the Great Depression. Because of the Depression, people expected less from the material sides of their lives and were also part of smaller cohorts. They therefore experienced less competition for jobs when they entered the labor force and were able to marry earlier. This explanation does not however explain why a larger proportion of women have two children. Bean provides an additional explanation for the baby boom. Bean argues that the increases in desired fertility can be interpreted as reflections of the cultural milieu of the times, as expressions of the number of children that women thought they ought to desire, given the sociocultural emphases of the moment. These expressions were of course imperfectly related to actual fertility. "The war had changed things. Many women not only had experienced the gratification of working outside the home, they had also experienced the independence of being on their own while their husbands were overseas. As the economic prosperity of the postwar years generated greater demand for their services, women began to enter, or re-enter, the labor force in greater numbers than before" (362). Confronted with a society that was rededicating itself to the family and traditional sex roles while at the same time encouraging women's participation in the labor force, women responded by showing a preference for increased family size, but then ten years later acknowledged that a substantial amount of their fertility had been unwanted. This does not explain why unwanted childbearing increased. Bean provides two answers: economic prosperity made contraceptive failures less costly; and increasing women's labor force participation in the face of unchanging views of sex roles may have cause conjugal strain and tension, which in turn, may negatively influence effective contraceptive practice, increasing the likelihood of unwanted pregnancies.