For all their headline-grabbing behavior, early Baby Boomers acted much like their parents' generation when it came to life's milestones. By age 20, nearly half of the first wave of boomers were married. Once married, they started having children. The similarity ended there.
Now, as the boomers reach age 60, they have experienced more family disruption than their parents could have imagined. Love has been a bumpy journey for some.
As a result, they head into their senior years far more likely to be divorced, remarried, cohabiting or living alone. Demographers warn such disruption could leave this generation with weaker family ties, making them more vulnerable as they age and need help.
"We're rewriting the books here," said Mary Elizabeth Hughes, a Duke University sociologist who has studied the boomers. "Many of these ties are going to be frail. They don't have the glue that previous ties did."
"We grew up believing in 'happily ever after,'" said Faye Haring, a retired Seaside Park postal worker who is turning 60 this year. She married at 23, only to find herself a single mother of two young boys when her husband left her in 1977. "At the time, divorce was taboo," she said. By the time her children entered elementary school, however, divorce had become so commonplace that more than half the children in her older son's grade lived in single-parent homes. "They weren't seen as odd because there was so many divorces around," she said.
While every generation has seen some of its members divorce, remarry or live alone, those numbers are all bigger for the group Hughes calls the "early boomers," those born from 1946 to 1955:
They are twice as likely to live alone as their parents' generation. While the percentage is not huge -- just 11 percent -- it reflects a striking break with the past. Hughes is quick to say she doesn't equate living alone with being lonely, or being without support. "You could be living alone but you could have tons of friends filling the gap. Living alone is only one piece of the puzzle -- a huge piece. But other social connections matter, too," she said. "When living alone becomes a problem is if you need help."
By age 40, one-third of early boomer women were divorced. By contrast, only 13 percent of their parents' generation were divorced by that age. It is a myth, however, that early boomers somehow began the divorce revolution. That fell to their older siblings, the War Babies of 1936-45, the generation that led the upsurge in divorce. But early boomers then went on to exceed their older siblings in the rate of divorce. Many of those divorced boomers remarried -- but not all. "Remarriage rates for them are on the high side, but not high enough to compensate for all the divorces," Hughes said.
Raised to look on cohabitation as "shacking up," early boomers nonetheless came to adopt living together as an acceptable way to form a family. Even in middle age, 4 percent were living with non-relatives; the figure was a paltry 1 percent for their parents. "It simply wasn't in people's repertoire," Hughes said. "Now, however, people view it as an option." With the children grown, couples no longer need marriage to confer legitimacy on their offspring, and they may well want to remain single to protect pension benefits or inheritances.
Source: KATHLEEN O'BRIEN, The Star-Ledger, April 17, 2006, www.NJ.com