Children of Baby Boomers

Yesterday I noticed an article by Debbie Schlussel, a fairly well known writer on political manners and the like. I found this particular article interesting because it was opining on the selfish nature of the Baby Boomer generation. I, as a guy in his mid-twenties, am not likely to be intimately aware of the societal differences between each successive generation as they of age to call the shots, simply because I have only lived through roughly 1 ½ generations in the societal driver’s seat. Specifically what she was getting at in this article was the apparently huge decrease in saving by Baby Boomers during retirement, money which would most likely be passed on as inheritance. Some may see this as selfish while others may see this as simply living life to the fullest, but I must admit I fall somewhere in the middle. I am as capitalistic as any guy out there- what you’ve earned is yours, but I do see the selfish component. To me it’s not necessarily the passing of large sums of money but the traditional values which have [or haven’t] also passed from parent to children. Frankly I don’t care if the Boomers pass on more than the historical average or not, but what I do care about is the loss of those values.
The way in which my semi-logical brain works, inheritance should almost certainly be passed down if your parents left inheritance to you. The matching of intergenerational values (monetary in this sense) seems to be the most important to me; simply if I received a certain allocation of inheritance from my parents, it would only be right to attempt to embrace those same values in planning for my children’s inheritance. It’s not really the money I’m thinking about in this example, but the core traditions and values each family has garnered generation upon generation being tossed out the window in a scant lifetime.
All this leads me into something I have thought quite a bit about in the past 5 or so years. When I take a look at the world around me, which in my case is 99.99% an American point of view, I see a society at large who has lost its traditions. Why were these traditions lost, and who did the losing you might ask? In my naïve sense of my society, it seems to have been the Boomers. We all know the larger history of the 1960s and early 1970s, as well as the societal upheaval spawned in that period, but I don’t think many consider the losses- things we lost as a society and a people. Without a doubt many important and forward thinking ideas and concepts were created, accepted, and/or made into law during this time, but we lost the meaning of a family. In my mind a people who make up a country, or larger society, are quite lost without a family and the traditions inherent to a family.
In the very late ‘40s and ‘50s the US was a country returning from the largest war ever known on the planet. When home these men and women’s worldview and lives had change dramatically, and in a play to return to a stable environment they created a somewhat neo-Victorian society. We all have a fairly good idea of what the “up tight” society of this time was like, clichés included. The rare reader of this article may have even lived through that time (ok wishful thinking). Now, if there is one thing children are quite good at, it’s rebellion, through both action and philosophy, and lo and behold there happened to be a very large generation of children newly born to take this rebellion to heart.
The obvious result of this rebellion can been found in history books, law, and personal conversation, so we have a very good idea just what became of this rebellious activity. Those results were the loss of the nuclear family, the clichéd family existing somewhere in the white bread American ether with 2.2 kids, a working father, and a homemaker mother. This idea of so-called suburban paradise doesn’t sound totally enticing to me, but the inherent values of that system do sort of sound pleasant these days when we idolize no-talent girls for slutty behavior and mimic a gangsta culture (mostly in a stupid faux sort of way, but still). The loss of these values has put our society on a course to love the famous and the infamous in identical manners. Why does this now happen? Why do we idolize trainwrecks instead of ability/talent? I think that’s summed up in the lost values of our “intimate support network”, also known as a family. When parents make the decisions to treat their kids as adults because it’s wrong to lie about Santa Claus and where babies comes from, the natural result is a child with wildly different values than his grandparents. When dinner is never spent together at the table, and is instead in front of the TV, the child’s values simply change. Maybe you see what I mean; I doubt I have to give every typical example of our society’s less than spectacular family norms to demonstrate my point.Quite simply put, children are raised in an environment which is much changed from that of previous generations. Obviously I am no social scientist, but this issue doesn’t seem to require a Ph.D. in any subject to see cause and effect- sweeping changes occurred to an earlier generation and now its children are living in a much different culture. Sure, technology has changed our lives, but shouldn’t parents be doing the job to keep their children appropriately exposed to such devices? Particularly TV, internet, video games, etc in lieu of more growth oriented endeavors like conversation, reading, and sports. Don’t get me wrong, I love all these things just as much as anyone, and not for 1 second do I believe those things are the root cause of these issues. Instead I think the issues are related to ways in which we treat children and adults regarding these things. They’ve only acted as tools to accelerate the changing ideals and culture. Children’s emotional growth has been accelerated immensely, to the point where they cannot properly handle certain responsibilities/requirements put on them.
So how do I get to finger pointing over the death of the family unit from retirement/inheritance savings? I think it’s related in ways which are more than minor or simply coincidental. The job of parenting was done in a much more laissez-faire manner, leaving kids to deal directly with realities of life. Why would Boomers do anything differently in death? The kids will learn as they go, using what they can scavenge, just as they did when they were schoolchildren.
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I don’t want to sound as if I am outright blaming the Baby Boomer generation for all societal ills around us currently. I only seek to work out the causal nature of our society, specifically identifying the nodal/shift points in our societal values. Perhaps the changes were inevitable and were simply embraced in such a manner by this arbitrary generation. To me it’s more about improvement than blame, and obviously the dynamics are intrinsically limited coming from the (naïve?) POV of a 20-something. As long as there is thought on causal outcomes I’m pleased.