Word: boom
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...great American baby boom is over. The explosive population surge that added some 40 million citizens to the U.S. in the 15 years after V-J day has subsided and may well continue to decline. The trend, only now showing up with any certainty on demographers' charts, is unlikely to make headlines; yet it speaks meaningfully to the nation's spiritual and material wellbeing, today and for years to come...
...number of children one has," declares Hauser, "has become the subject of fad and fashion. This is the same kind of pattern that enters into other kinds of consumer habits. The third and fourth child were a form of status during the post-World War II baby boom. Now fashion is swinging women to the view that it is desirable to have fewer children." Mass communications media, Anthropologist Margaret Mead points out, have made birth control "more socially and ethically acceptable," and it is no longer fashionable for the educated to have large families...
...recent Gallup poll affirmed that big families are losing vogue. In 1945, just I as the baby boom was getting under way, 49% of the people polled said the ideal family should have four or more children. Today the figure is down to 35%, about where it was when the question was first asked 30 years ago. Just as important, notes Gallup, Americans no longer associate a growing population with progress; indeed, more than two-thirds look upon it as a "serious problem...
Slight Miscalculation. Unless the birth rate slumps much farther than it has, the number of births will inevitably start up again within the next few years as children born in the boom reach marriageable age. Recent population projections for the end of the century have ranged all the way from 263 million to 388 million, but most experts are reluctant to be pinned down on long-term figures, pointing out that the most reliable study in the early '40s projected a population of 165 million for the year 2000-a figure exceeded more than a decade...
...people, but what we need is high-caliber individuals contributing as individuals. We need quality; quantity takes care of itself." Dr. Rock believes that a high birth rate actually saps the country's defenses, arguing that the very quality of life would have suffered if the baby boom had continued for very long...