I've been thinking about this a lot, kind of to do with the Child's pay (CBS Censorship) Thread. Who is in generation X? What is their birthrate? Are they inhibited by the heritage of depression-era grandparents, or are they uninhibited by having reversed the population bomb?
I've always thought of myself in the middle of generation X. I think the front end of it hit 40 last year, and the youngest are 25 or so.
Edit: Sources are split between the Generation x dates of '65-85 and the Generations dates of 61-81.
The National Center for Health Statistics (a site referred from census.gov) shows that Generation X produced the same number or more of children as the Baby Boomers, while having fewer people doing the producing.
1973-76 shows a trough in the 3.1 million range, and 1989-93 is a crest of over 4 million. Well, I'll have to give the "average age of mother" data a look when it isn't midnight.
[ January 24, 2004, 01:56 AM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
The last graph I saw for births up until about 1990 or so did not show that at all.
I'm having a hard time finding the particular link you're looking at. Is it the first link on the page? If so,that's just raw numbers and difficult to parse.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
I'm doing some data crunching on it. I'm no statistician, but it looks like the gross number of births for women born in 1955 is no larger than the gross number of births for women born in 1965, with there being fewer people who were born in 1965. (This involves transferring the birth by age data into a spreadsheet that sorts the mothers by year of birth).
So basically, there has not been an echo "baby bust" (as the birthrate dip resulting in Generation X has been termed). I'll probably have a look at the race data to see if family size is increasing or if this reflects immigration or something like that.
Also, folks are likely to bring up that more Baby boomers had babies in their autumn years. Perhaps, which is why I went to the trouble of sorting by the mother's year of birth. It's kind of moot since we won't know if Generation X does that. But I'm inclined to assume not.
Posted by Jon Boy (Member # 4284) on :
I believe it's called "Generation X" because it's the tenth generation since the Declaration of Independence (a generation being twenty years). So it's the group that was born between 1976 and 1996. Though that's a pretty large group to lump together. Of course, I don't even know if that's accurate. I just heard it once.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
That is the theory in the Generations book I mentioned, and they like the 65-85 dates. I think one of the main features of Generation X is our lack of interest in what we, as a generation, stand for. Thus the difficulty in defining it.
My oldest sister is born in 1963. The first time she read about the baby bust they tried to name it as a variant of Yuppie. "YIFfie" (Young, Independent, and Few) didn't stick for some reason. Nothing like being referred to as "Yuppie Lite". Posted by Danzig (Member # 4704) on :
I never thought of myself as being Generation X. The cutoff should be at least 1980, if not 1975.
Posted by Happy Camper (Member # 5076) on :
Yeah, I was always sort of under the impression that the tail end of Gen X was turning 20 when I was about 12 (Born in '79). Of course that isn't any kind of solid definition, but I sure don't consider myself part of it.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
When I mentioned the 73-76 neap to my husband, he pointed out that Watergate probably made people skittish. I think that may be the most telling factor. Cuban Missle Crisis probably was a downer, while Moon Landing, the (post) Bicentennial, and the fall of the Berlin Wall/ end of Cold War probably boosted optimism. What other parallels do you see? Keeping in mind it wouldn't be the actual year, but a year or two after.
Posted by Maccabeus (Member # 3051) on :
YIFfie? Sweet jebus....am I ever glad that didn't happen. (Yiffie, or more commonly yiffy, is a slang term for furry porn...)
I've always figured I'm part of Generation X (1975), but I resemble it only in a few vague ways.
Posted by Valentine014 (Member # 5981) on :
I remember reading a book about Gen Xers and according to that, my mom and I are both in Gen X and my brother is a Generation Next. I was born in 1980 and he was born in 1988.
I think we've gotten a bad name thanks to movies like Clerks and Singles, (both were excellent) but at times, I can see how close those movies come to the true "us". Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
I consider Generation X to be the group that grew up watching one of the following films in high school:
Fast Times at Ridgemont High The Breakfast Club Labyrinth Wayne's World
If you were too old to see any of those in high school, you're too old to be GenX. If you were too young to see any of those while in high school, you're too young.
Posted by lcarus (Member # 4395) on :
When you say "too old to see any of those," do you mean to old for any one of those titles, or too old for all of them? Because I think I'm right atthe center of most definitions of Generation X, but I was out of high school before Wayne's World.
(Come to think of it, you're spanning a pretty wide number of years with those movies, so one would have had to spend a good decade in high school to have seen them all there, so, um, yeah. I guess I've answered my own question. Duh. )
Posted by Shan (Member # 4550) on :
Well, some doooo spend nearly a decade in high school, Ic!
I'd forgotten about the Breakfast Club. That was as angsty as Waynes World was fun -
hmmmm.
Posted by Storm Saxon (Member # 3101) on :
I can't believe you forgot the best Gen X film of all time.
[ January 24, 2004, 10:28 PM: Message edited by: Storm Saxon ]
Posted by Valentine014 (Member # 5981) on :
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