I believe the commonly held view ( held particularly by academics) about the importance of the increase in the number of postwar babies decades is widely misplaced.
Instead, what is really important in when exactly these children were born and raised up.
Because what really separated these kids from their slightly older siblings, parents and grandparents was that these kids (and these kids alone) did not personally experience firsthand the messy complexity of WWII and instead only got it second hand and prettied-up, from teachers and popular myths.
Let us - for the sake of argument - assume that the same numbers of new births had happened in the the period from 1929 to 1940 rather than from 1946 to 1959.
Would this earlier boom have meant that these boomers too would march for human rights for blacks, Jews, gays, women, American Indians and the physically challenged as soon as they reached their late teenage years ?
I doubt it ---- WWII really changed things and it was thus inevitable that the post WWII kids - whether born in a big bundle or in a tiny number - would still have rose up against the nasty prewar beliefs than many of the adults around them till held.
Postwar kids truly says it all - at least for me - and I was one of them...
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