The baby boomers were the main focus in a 2012 special issue of the academic journalThe Gerontologist. The editorial in the volume pays special attentions to the nearly 79 million baby boomers living in the United States, whose birth years span almost twenty years, and it acknowledges their significance not only because of their sheer size, but also because of their distinct social and demographic characteristics as well as the heterogeneity of this group. The main idea emphasised throughout the text is that the baby boomers are about to change what we know about old age in way similar to how they have redefined each stage of life as they experienced it (Pruchno 2012: 149). The editorial finishes with following concluding remarks:
(…) The size and heterogeneity of this group will influence how Boomers age and will shape our knowledge base. They will make demands on the services and institutions designed to provide health care, transportation, and housing to previous cohort of older people. Everything that we think we know about the ageing process–from the way in which functional disability
develops to the extent to which families will provide support to the decisions that people will make about retirement–has the potential to be altered(Pruchno 2012:152).
Biggs et al. (2007a) have explored whether the first wave of baby boomers born during the immediate post-war period in the United Kingdom might experience growing old in a different way compared to their predecessors. An extensive review of academic and popular literature in the UK and US reveals three approaches that are reciprocally connected in terms of maturation of the baby boom generation: first, baby boomers as a group re-defining old age;
second, baby boomers as a distinctive group of consumers; third, baby boomers as workers and producers (Biggs et al. 2007a: 33). Discussions in the literature differentiate the baby boomers from the traditional life course of an older population characterised by state pension age and illustrate them as playing a central role in a perception shift about later life, a shift from disengagement and structural dependency to potential agency and utilising new opportunities. The baby boomers are presented as a significant group of consumers, and their good health and productivity are expected to contribute to resolving some of the problems emerging with population ageing. Finally, the baby boomers are seen as having different attitudes about and views on the ageing process, reflecting both their consumption practices and cultural traits.
Biggs et al. (2007a: 35) conclude that these various features identified in the existing literature have led to the creation of baby boomers as a distinct social, economic and cultural group.
The same team of researchers next chose to specifically focus on consumption as a defining feature in the ageing of the baby boomers. In an article titled ‘The Mature Imagination and Consumption Strategies: Age and Generation in the Development of a United Kingdom Baby Boomer Identity’
(Biggs et al. 2007b), they critically examine the consumption practices and strategies employed by the ‘first wave’ baby boomers (those born between 1945 and 1954) in the United Kingdom to manage identity as they grow older. They conducted 150 general interviews, followed by 30 in-depth, biographical interviews, in order to investigate the relationship between changing attitudes on ageing and patterns of consumption. They used questions concerning attitudes about ‘boomer’ cohort labels, personal ageing and other generations to compare the consumption choices made by baby boomers in areas considered to be key to an ageing identity, including appearance, clothing and bodily maintenance (Biggs et al. 2007b: 31).
The results of the above study are as follows. Regarding attitudes about personal ageing, the baby boomers claimed not to be concerned with bodily ageing as such, albeit the respondents admitted attempting to maintain a balance between youthful and mature identities through their consumption practices. They reported feeling younger than their actual age and a tendency to draw on both past experiences and future expectations in evaluating their life course. In their attitudes to younger and older generational groups, the
baby boomers reported identifying more with successive generations than with preceding generations. Such a prioritised strategy is blurring the boundaries between the boomers themselves and younger adult generations, which is called the intergenerational ‘downward blurring’. These analytical results caused the authors to conclude that consumption emerges for the baby boomers as part of a wider strategy to manipulate their age identity and relations with younger generations (Biggs et al. 2007b: 56).
Leach et al. (2013) have further analysed the same research data and suggest that the baby boomers view themselves as a ‘bridging’ generation between their own parents and children. For them, ‘bridging’ refers not only to straddling the cultural values represented by different generations, but also the rapid social changes impacting different generations. The boomers are moving between these two very different societies, functioning as a bridge between eras (Leach et al. 2013: 15). While they demonstrate a significant generational gap in values between themselves and their parents, they also show attachment to continuity with their parental culture of austerity.
Correspondingly, the boomers identify with younger generations in the fields of technology, fashion and social life, regardless of being critical of the excessive consumerism of younger generations. The idea of a bridging generation is shared also by Finnish baby boomers (Karisto 2007a), as discussed in previous sections of this chapter. However, the word has a different connotation in each country. Somewhat emphasised in the UK context is individual boomers who are a bridge between family generations in terms of habitus, whereas in Finland the baby boomers as a generation have shaped a bridge between two different eras and societies.
As the concept of the ‘Third Age’ suggests, recent approaches in social gerontology have advocated greater potential agency in later life in place of emphasising disengagement from society or structural dependency on social policy (Gilleard & Higgs 2002). Unlike the empirical works implemented by Biggs et al. (2007b) and Leach et al. (2013), Gilleard and Higgs (2002, 2007) have chosen to take into account theoretical considerations to better make sense of this contemporary change in later life and ageing of the baby boomers within the construct of a generational approach. They summarise the classic theory of Karl Mannheim (1952/1928) on the formation of generation as follows. The three elements making up a generation are a shared temporal location (i.e. generational site or birth cohort), a shared historical location (i.e.
generation as actuality – exposure to a common period or era) and a shared socio-cultural location (i.e. generational consciousness – or ‘entelechy’) (Gilleard & Higgs 2002: 373). This means that the process whereby a cohort becomes a generation requires members of the cohort to be exposed to common experiences of the era and to embrace a common generational consciousness regarding these experiences. The baby boomers experienced the enormous social and cultural transformations that took place in the post-World War II decades, throughout their youth and subsequent adult lives. The shared experience of having witnessed the same post-war cultural
transformation is the one factor, according to Gilleard and Higgs (2002: 376), which helped alter the baby boom cohort into being the baby boom generation.
Core elements of the post-war changes are increases in income, wealth, consumption and leisure. The baby boomers have developed the consciousness of being a generation across their life course through experiencing the shifts in income, wealth and values supported by mass consumption, mass communication and marketing (Gilleard & Higgs 2002:
379; Gilleard & Higgs 2007: 17–19). It can be argued, consequently, that changes in the meaning of old age, or in other words, the emergence of the term the ‘Third Age’ derives from the generational consciousness that evolved during the second half of the 20th century.
The young-old5 period of life, characterised by consumption practices and the concept of the Third Age, does not, however, continue perpetually.
Growing old inevitably brings about the phase in which one confronts physical and cognitive decline that necessitates care and the support of others. Much of the increase in long-term care needs throughout industrialised countries will be prompted by the ageing of the baby boomers, and many in society will view this as a burden. Knickman and Snell (2002) reviewed the extant literature for arguments about the challenge of future long-term care from the perspective of economic burden in the US context. According to them, there are three accounts that make caring for an ageing society potentially dreadful. The first concern is growing dependency ratios: the large growth in the number of elderly persons accelerated by the ageing boomers over the coming decades is projected to occur simultaneously with a sharp drop in the number of workers per elderly person. The second argument has to do with the economic burden of long-term care, focusing specifically on the rapid inflation in expenditures for Medicare and Medicaid in recent years. The final concern refers to the assumption that children with experiences of parental divorce may be less willing or able to care for their ageing parents. The boom in divorce rates that began with the baby boomers may result in shrinking informal care resources, which will put pressure on formal care systems both in public and private terms.
As Knickman and Snell (2002) state, it is possible to improve dependency ratios by redefining age groups as productive and dependent segments of the population, and an advance in the health status of the elderly is likely to lead to a decline in the disability rate, which may alleviate the macro-economic burden of long-term care. Nevertheless, the estimated weakening family relations with respect to the baby boomers will remain a serious challenge for society. Ryan et al. (2012) sought to model the availability of informal caregivers for American baby boomers in their old age. For this purpose, the researchers first compared the close family resources of the baby boomers (1946–1964) to previous cohorts of older adults at the level of the general
5 Older adults between 65 and 74 years of age are termed a young-old population, whereas those who are 75 years old and over are termed an old-old population. Among the old-old population, persons aged 85 and over are referred to as the oldest-old.
population, and then they examined individual-level cohort comparisons of changes in informal care availability from midlife into old age (Ryan et al.
2012: 177, 185). The birth cohorts that they compared with the boomers were Depression and World War II parents (1905-1921) and the parents of baby boomers (1922–1940). The study initially identified similarities with respect to the fertility and marital status of the baby boomers and the cohort of Depression and World War II parents. Meanwhile, longitudinal analyses of the availability of informal caregivers revealed that the availability of family members changes over time and that the cohort of Depression and World War II parents was significantly less likely to be married and to have a child living nearby compared with the cohort of the parents of baby boomers. Assuming Depression and World War II parents as a proxy for the baby boomers, the findings suggest that as the baby boomers enter into later life, they may have a lower likelihood of access to both a spouse and adult children (Ryan et al.
2012: 185). However, the study concludes that using the cohort of Depression and World War II parents as a model for the baby boomers in later life is not ideal, as the respective cohorts have different life courses and experiences of different historical events, which is likely to influence the availability of caregivers in dissimilar ways.
Diminishing kinship ties of the baby boomers is an issue of concern in another study, too. A sociodemographic portrait of the American baby boomers provided by Lin and Brown (2012) finds that one in three baby boomers is unmarried (i.e. divorced, widowed or never married). Unmarried boomers face greater economic, health and social vulnerabilities compared with married boomers. The study further reveals heterogeneity among unmarried boomers and different implication for females and males. Divorced boomers have more economic resources and better health than widowed and never-married boomers. Widows appear to be the most disadvantaged group among women, whereas never marrieds are the least advantaged group among men (Lin & Brown 2012: 153, 163). These findings can be understood as consequences of the complex family life that the baby boomers in the United States have experienced throughout their adult age: delayed marriage, climbing divorce rate, increasing cohabitation rate and out-of-wedlock childbearing, and so forth. As the baby boomers move into older adulthood, they will increasingly be unmarried because of continuing experiences of divorce and widowhood, leaving them vulnerable in economic, health and social aspects. The absence of a spouse especially makes men vulnerable because they are less likely to have access to social support compared to women. Likewise, widowhood has a heavily gendered disposition: the majority of older women are widows, whereas men typically are in a marriage/cohabitation arrangement. Lin and Brown (2012: 163) conclude that health and social support deficits among unmarried boomers could place a heavy burden on society in the near future.
Whereas previous studies explore ageing of the baby boomers from diverse perspectives, including socio-cultural, theoretical, economic and
sociodemographic viewpoints, studies on ageing baby boomers as a social rather than a demographic group are still insufficient. The baby boomers are said to be an age group that paradoxically has been much discussed but not systematically analysed (Achenbaum 2012: 285), and scholarly attention has been more limited thus far (Pruchno 2012: 149). Drawing attention to the British first-wave baby boomers, Leach et al. (2008) identify three reasons for making the boomers an important group justifying further sociological study:
first, the social construction of the boomers as both a threat and contributors to society; second, the re-creation of retirement and later life stimulated by active consumerism; third, possible diversity in resources and outlook of the boomers in their later life. These accounts as well as many of earlier studies, however, tend to place the baby boomers in a particular context; most of the discussion has revolved around the British and American baby boomers.
The baby boom also took place in other parts of the world, and there are countries that are confronting the ageing of the population more acutely than the United Kingdom and the United States. As section 2 of this chapter explicated, the sociological significance of the Japanese and Finnish baby boomers is evident by their shared generational experiences. It can be argued that the implications of the baby boomers for ageing societies are more prominent in both countries in social as well as demographic terms. The generational significance of the baby boomers has shaped the boom cohort into a socially distinguishable group in both Japan and in Finland. Studying the ageing of these unique social groups offers advantages for exploring contemporary ageing, its social and cultural meanings, and social perceptions about old age.