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What is the baby boom?
The concept of the baby boom has become a favourite metaphor used by demographers to explain or contextualise the large cohorts of people born in the period following the Depression and the Second World War.
When did the baby boom take place?
The baby boom in New Zealand was largely restricted to the European population and unrelated to the transition in the Māori population (Pool, 1977). Generally it is regarded as starting after the Second World War and finishing in the mid-1960s, although both of these dates are subject to debate.
For example, the sharp rise in fertility and childbearing from around 1937 can be seen as the beginning of the baby boom, as those born during the First World War and surviving the 1918 influenza pandemic reached childbearing age (Sardon and Calot, 1997). In this case, we would regard the combined effects of precipitated marriages and births in 1939 (just before the war) and delayed marriages which followed the war as disruptions in an otherwise continuous process through to around 1964. For this reason, this period is also referred to as the post-Depression baby boom.
The end of the baby boom has been generally, and justifiably, taken to be 1964, but some literature adopts later or earlier dates for New Zealand. Other countries experienced different patterns, which affect the dating of the baby boom period in different localities.
Some recent marketing-oriented analysis has preferred to end the period in 1961 to fit the subsequent Generation-X and Generation-Y into their model of current age-group consumer behaviour. This is based largely on US experience with less relevance to the New Zealand population.
Why did the baby boom occur?
A detailed analysis of the causes of the baby boom among the European population of New Zealand and the different transition experience by the Māori population remains to be written. However, some general features are clear.
The period was characterised by:
- increasingly younger women beginning childbearing from the late 1930s to the mid 1950s
- precipitated childbearing in 1939 with the impending onset of the Second World War
- older women (who had delayed childbearing during the Depression and the Second World War) beginning childbearing.
The outcome was that not only were women each having more children on average, but more women were having children. This effect is especially apparent with the large number of births in the late 1940s although fertility had risen much earlier. The lag between the drop in fertility and the drop in the number of births at the end of the period is also partly the result of this effect. In particular, the effect of changing childbearing patterns was to exagerate changes in the total fertility rate for this period. This means that the total fertility rate is a less reliable guide to actual fertility than the completed fertility rate.
What are the issues and consequences?
Policy analysts tend to use the baby boom as an explanatory cause of change without considering other factors such as volatility in migration gains and losses, which may have a more direct impact on policy.
The time scale of policy intent should define how the relative size of neighbouring cohorts of interest are analysed. For short-term needs where life-stage transitions are significant, relative differences between cohorts are important, but attempts to extrapolate these differences should be treated with caution.
Large cohorts flowing through a population do have medium and short-term consequences on the need for services and the availability of resources to satisfy demand. But these waves are largely a feature of the recent past and present. The damping out of waves is expected to be rapid and largely swamped by other demographic processes such as migration. However, the passage of baby boom cohorts through the population is important for understanding the impact of population ageing and eventually of potential population decline.
References
Barry J (2004) The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, Viking Books, New York.
Pool I (2007). The baby boom in New Zealand and other western developed countries. Journal of Population Research 24(2):141-161.
Pool I. (1977) The Māori population of New Zealand 1769-1971. Auckland UP/Oxford UP, Auckland
Rice G (2005) Black November: the 1918 influenza epidemic in New Zealand, University of Canterbury Press, Christchurch
Sardon J-P and G Calot (1997). La reprise de la fécondité au milieu des années 1930, phénomène non percu des observateurs du temps? Colloque Adolfe Landry: économiste, démographe, et législateur, Corte 3-6 Sept 1997.
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