Mid-20th century baby boom

The middle of the 20th century was marked by a significant and persistent increase in fertility rates in many countries, especially in the Western world.

The "relative income" theory explains the baby boom by suggesting that the late 1940s and the 1950s brought low desires to have material objects, because of the Great Depression and World War II, as well as plentiful job opportunities (being a post-war period).

Following this period, the next generation had a greater desire for material objects, however, an economic slowdown in the United States made jobs harder to acquire.

They doubted the explanations (including the Easterlin hypothesis) which considered the post-war economic prosperity that followed deprivation of the Great Depression as main cause of the baby boom, stressing that GDP-birth rate association was not consistent (positive before 1945 and negative after) with GDP growth accounting for a mere 5 percent of the variance in the crude birth rate over the period studied by the authors.

[9] Jona Schellekens claims that the rise in male earnings that started in the late 1930s accounts for most of the rise in marriage rates and that Richard Easterlin's hypothesis according to which a relatively small birth cohort entering the labor market caused the marriage boom is not consistent with data from the United States.

[13] Greenwood, Seshadri, and Vandenbroucke ascribe the baby boom to the diffusion of new household appliances that led to reduction of costs of childbearing.

[15] Judith Blake and Prithwis Das Gupta point out the increase in ideal family size in the times of baby boom.

A joke emerged at the time around comedic speculation that women were going to college to earn their MRS degree due to the increased marriage rate.

The U.S. Census Bureau defines baby boomers as those born between mid-1946 and mid-1964,[2] although the U.S. birth rate began to increase in 1941, and decline after 1957.

At one point during this period, Madison, New Jersey only had fifty babysitters for its population of 8,000, dramatically increasing demand for sitters.

[33] The baby boom was very strong in Norway and Iceland, significant in Finland, moderate in Sweden and relatively weak in Denmark.

[34] There was a strong baby boom in Czechoslovakia, but it was weak or absent in Poland, Bulgaria, Russia, Estonia and Lithuania, partly as a result of the Soviet famine of 1946–1947.

[39] The baby boom in Mongolia is probably explained by improvement in health and living standards related to the adoption of technologies and modernisation.