The Boomerang Effect

With our kids acting like our parents, we're on our own again

BABY BOOMERS love to examine themselves.

By "examine themselves" I do not mean stripping down to bare skin and taking a close look at their nude bodies. True, baby boomers will strip naked, but it will be for something like taking a shower or changing their clothes.

Baby boomers certainly won't stand in front of the bathroom mirror totally naked to see if they are still pretty hot stuff. No, if a modern boomer strips down and happens to catch a peek in the mirror, the boomer is more likely thinking, "Why does my body look like it's filled with cottage cheese?" So when I speak of boomers loving to "examine themselves," I mean we like to know what makes us tick. Companies and universities like to know just as much as we do. That's because if a company can figure out what boomers want before boomers even know they want it, that company will make a beezillion dollars.

For example, several companies figured out that those long-haired, society-hating, free-love-making hippies of the late 1960s and early '70s would want to drive vehicles loaded with kids in soccer uniforms in the 1980s, and made a fortune selling us mini-vans.

It's stuff like this that has made the boomer generation the most studied group ever to come down the pike.

Alert readers may notice that I have referred to baby boomers as "we" and "us." That's because your favorite columnist is not just a member of the boomer generation but one of its leaders. I was born in 1946, and graduated from Everett High School in 1964, just when the boomers flooded the job market and overran the colleges.

As a born leader of the generation, I read all the studies about our extended family. I like to read them because the studies say how important we are. But I was reading one study the other day that took me by surprise. It said our pampered, beloved offspring, sometimes known as Gen-Xers, are not going to grow up to be like their do-your-own-thing parents. Our children, it said, are taking after other members of the family — and it ain't the weird uncles living in trailers. No, it said, our kids are acting more like their grandparents!!

I couldn't follow everything the study said, but I found myself nodding in agreement with some of the findings. For example, it said our parents did things on a massive scale. They built huge cities for their growing families. They created multi-lane freeways so they could get between those cities, and giant dams to get power to them.

Our parents ran their personal lives in some big ways, too. It wasn't unusual for a couple to have three, four, half a dozen kids. That's how we boomers got started.

But the study said when we came along, we did things differently. Instead of organizing ourselves in large groups around large projects, we did things more as individuals. Computer technology, for instance, was invented mostly by individuals working in their garages. The boomers didn't build roads, they built the information highway.

Now we boomers are buying big houses, but not ones with four bedrooms for kids. We're more interested in houses that have "media rooms" and space for pursuing our hobbies.

But the boomer children are not in the basement by themselves. They're all chatting on the Internet, or on their phones "talking" to each other by pushing the keys. They even date as a group. Our children go out with six or eight boys and girls at a time.

I read part of this article to the Truly Unpleasant Mrs. Johnston until her eyes rolled to the back of her head and she passed out. When she woke, she said the article was full of baloney, much like me. She said most of our friends have lots of friends.

"You only do everything by yourself because you don't have enough friends to share your nutty theories with," she said.

"We'll see about that," I snorted, and picked up the phone to call some friends right then and there.

Unfortunately, the one phone number I remembered went directly to my pal's voice mail. I'll bet he was busy doing something important in his basement. I left a message at the beep and went to my "media room" to check messages on my computer. I was happy to see some young woman wanted to show me her private movie collection.

Ha! And they say we boomers don't communicate with each other.

Steve Johnston is a retired Seattle Times reporter. He can be reached at stevejonst@aol.com. Paul Schmid is a Times staff artist.