Baby Boom

All you had to do was stand in one of the stroller-choked aisles in Baltimore's Festival Hall this weekend to know that, yes, the demographers are right: There's a baby boom going on.Babies were everywhere: toddlers doing that funny stiff-legged wobbly walk, crawlers and newborns being pushed along in single and double-wide strollers, being carried in backpacks or papoose-style on the chest, and there were those who hadn't arrived, but whose presence was...

Within weeks of Army Spc. Johnnie Rice's return home from the Persian Gulf, he had persuaded his girlfriend to move from Dallas to be with him at Fort Bragg, N.C., proposed to her, made all the plans for an October wedding -- and even started down the road to diapers, playpens and training wheels."

WASHINGTON -- Baby boomers, whose advance guard is now entering midlife and rapidly nearing retirement, will compete with other age groups -- and even among themselves -- for increasingly scarce Social Security and health care resources, according to an analysis released yesterday.The graying of the baby boomers, or those Americans born between 1946 and 1964, will place new strains on the nation's social safety net as "this crowded generation passes through its life cycle," the private Population Reference Bureau said in its report.

The baby boom generation hasn't finished making its mark on the planet, but it probably already can claim the title of most self-assured generation in history. It's the most learned, the most mobile, the most sophisticated of any group that's come before. The boomers' formative years, like a Sesame Street episode, were sponsored by the letter "W" -- for War, Woodstock and Watergate. The times encouraged them to speak up, to go for the gusto, to just do it.Yet one task seems to overwhelm them, or at least swamp them with self-doubt: Parenting.

"As a baby boomer yourself,'' my friend the English journalist asked, ''how do you feel about the Democrats nominating two men from your own generation?''I don't often think in generational terms -- in part because, at 42, doing so reminds me that the gray in my beard no longer can be be called ''premature.'' And there's something a little silly about a bunch of middle-age people running around calling themselves baby anythings.Still, my friend's question was more interesting than most obvious ones.

Amid the largest crop of American newborns since the baby boom, a new federal report reveals some worrisome changes in recent childbirth patterns across the nation. Rates of births to teens and to unwed women have ended years of declines and headed higher, setting new records, according to the report on birth trends in 2006 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time, the percentage of women receiving prenatal medical care in their first trimester, a trend that had been improving, turned lower.

Baby boomers, check your service. Turns out, there is no Peter Pan. Starting immediately, you are the grown-ups.You know what this means, don't you? As of now, when you and the parents go out to dinner, you pick up the check.My g-g-g-g-eneration?This is the rite of passage we've all heard so much about, but never really believed in. Never wanted to believe in. Now you can mark the date -- Tuesday, Nov. 3, 1992. Bill "Baby Boom Boom" Clinton wins the White House; Tinkerbell is dead. (The good news is, you can still wear jeans and sneaks.

WE HAVE BEEN told countless times that, because of its youth, the Democratic ticket will appeal to the baby-boom generation. Well, I'm a baby boomer. I know many baby boomers. A lot of baby boomers are friends of mine.These guys are no baby boomers.It's probably no coincidence that the journalists screaming loudest about this ticket's generational appeal are all older than we are. After all, Bill Clinton was a noticeable washout among baby-boom voters in the primaries -- instead, running strongest with the elderly, who are, after all, the parents of baby boomers.

Title: "Career Crash: The New Crisis -- and Who Survives"Author: Barry GlassnerPublisher: Simon & Schuster-! Length, price: 223 pages, $21 It must be frustrating not to be a member of the baby boom generation. Media attention is most sharply focused on whatever stage of life boomers are in; problems are analyzed and dissected as if no one ever experienced them before.It's easy to be flip about baby boomers' self-absorbed desire to wring fulfillment from every aspect of their lives. Certainly other generations have borne greater hardships.

The likely fall campaign between President Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton will be the first electoral collision between the two generations that have dominated American life for the past 45 years.At age 67, Mr. Bush is, in all probability, the last who will be drawn from the "GI generation," presidents who fought as young men in World War II, manned the barricades of the Cold War and who have held the Oval Office without interruption since former President Kennedy captured the presidency more than 31 years ago.If Mr. Clinton, 45, holds on to win the Democratic race, he would become the first presidential nominee from the baby boom -- the 76-million-member generation that has revolutionized America's social mores, but not yet exerted the political influence many of its members have considered their birthright since the turbulent 1960s.