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The Baby Boom was a birth cohort that spanned a lot of years, characterized only by high birth rates. (The Baby Boom is the only time in United States history when the long-term trend of ever higher ages of first marriage and ever lower rates of fertility was reversed.) A lot of thoughtful analysts distinguish the earlier part of the Baby Boom (parents who were part of the "Greatest Generation," which participated as adults in World War II) from the later part of the Baby Boom (parents in the "Silent Generation," whose earliest memories are of the Great Depression, and who didn't reach adulthood until after the war was over). I think that makes sense. Greatest Generation parents were about looking out for other people, as a group central tendency, and Silent Generation parents were about looking out for number one. (Silent Generation persons politically did well, gaining the greatest net surplus over the actuarial value of their Social Security benefits through taxation of younger working people, for example.)

In each generation, there are parents of differing core values. There are also children who either accept their parents' values, or react against them. That goes on throughout history. The one sure thing that demographers discovered is that during the Baby Boom there was a lower ratio of care-giving adults to minor children in the whole society than at almost any time before or since. Large family sizes spread parenting thin. So the Baby Boomers had less parental face time to receive parental influence one way or another than the preceding generations, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear (as we do in the opinion essay submitted here) that Baby Boomers, as a group central tendency, are less practiced in traditional parenting approaches than earlier generations, for better or for worse.

(Can you guess where I fit among the generations by what I write here?)

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It's not just the parents, but the "boomers," as well. Some analysts see two groups in the "Baby Boom": 1946-1955 and 1956-1964. I don't know where the break should be, but one of my sisters was born in 1963 and has never struck me as a "Baby Boomer." She doesn't remember very much of the 1960s, the draft, Vietnam, etc. An article in USA Today, a few years back, on these "Shadow Boomers" mentioned a woman born in 1964 and both her parents were born in 1946 -- all three are Baby Boomers.