Five reasons Boomer men had it easier than the rest of us

Employment rates were high and house prices were low for baby boomers growing up. Photo / Getty Images

THREE KEY FACTS

• Millennials and Gen Z argue life is harder now, with Boomer men seen as particularly fortunate.
• Boomer men benefited from post-war economic growth, full employment, and affordable housing at a young age.
• Their financial advantages allow them to support younger generations entering the property market.

Millennials and Gen Z have long complained that life is harder now, but when it comes to 50% of one generation, they may be right.

“OK, Boomer” has been the dismissive cry of Millennial and Gen Z prigs for a few years now. Even Gen Xers have begun to look down on their parents. In particular, men of a certain age are getting used to being patronised by the ungrateful progeny who followed in their wake. But maybe – just maybe – Boomer men have brought a little of this on themselves and maybe they have been the luckiest 50% of the luckiest generation ever to have had their cake and eaten it.

Broadly speaking, Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964, though for our purposes we are talking about men born in the decade after the end of World War II. And why just men? Well, when you look at the lives of Boomers, it’s the men who appear to have benefited most from the traditions they inherited from their fathers and the new freedoms their mothers and wives allowed them. Not that you’d know that from the amount of moaning on Facebook about self-service checkouts or the price of Eric Clapton merch and elasticated trousers.

In the deeply uncharitable view of A Generation of Sociopaths: How The Baby Boomers Ruined America by Bruce Cannon Gibney, one of many such aggressive books on the subject, “The generation squandered its enormous inheritance, abused its power, and subsidised its binges with loans collateralised by its children … Not all Baby Boomers are sociopaths, but an unusually large number have behaved antisocially, skewing outcomes in ways deeply unfavourable to the nation, especially its younger citizens.”

It may feel a bit rich to single out Boomers in this way – especially as Millennials are routinely accused of being snowflakes and Gen Z are labelled work-shy and entitled – but when you look at this in the round, you have to admit that Boomer men had it pretty sweet compared with those who came after them.

1. They were spoilt as children

One of the most commonly reported characteristics of Boomer men is that they are babies, stuck in one form of emotional arrested development or another since the 1950s. It is true that in their professional lives they’ve been the opposite, but in relationships with their wives and children they have often remained in the soft-soap routines set by their anxious and mollycoddling mothers.

The trauma of the war experience meant Boomer boys tended to be spoilt by at least one parent. Photo / Getty Images

A feature of 1950s family dynamics was that the parents’ experiences of the World War II fed into their child-rearing. This is entirely understandable: the double trauma of the war experience – women largely at home living in fear, some in danger of being bombed themselves, and men who returned psychologically damaged from the horrors of conflict – meant Boomer boys across all social classes tended to be spoilt by at least one parent.

“There was a mid-century shift that Boomers evolved into,” says Dr Andrew Seaton, a historian of modern Britain at UCL. “The size of families is reduced and this – along with suburbanisation and new towns across the country, access to holidays, and cars – leads to a more intimate family life. There is also a shift in masculinity with fathers spending more time at home with their children than they did before the War. It means more emphasis on the nuclear family, which became so important in the 1950s.”

If they were not cosseted in suburbia, Boomers in boarding schools had a matron, who doubled up as the all-purpose provider, housekeeper and comforter-in-chief that meant when the boys popped out of the other side of university their everyday skills did not extend far beyond driving a Ford Anglia too quickly.

2. They had the best of the sexual revolution

After childhood, Boomer men characteristically found girlfriends and wives who could replicate the behavioural patterns of their mothers. The introduction of the contraceptive pill to the UK in 1961 was no doubt a boon for many women, both on health grounds and in taking more control over their own lives, but it also allowed men to enjoy the fruits of the sexual revolution to come later in the 1960s if they so wished. They could still have long-term partners who behaved as if it was 1953, washing their clothes, preparing their food and raising their children, while Boomer men’s model of family life as bread-winner and decision-making patriarch remained as solid as ever.

“The 1960s saw a lot of messages of freedom and a loosening of sexual mores, but what the feminist movement in the 1970s very accurately pointed out was that this message of freedom mainly benefited men,” says Seaton.

At its most basic, it means Boomer men grew up dissociated from “feminine” work, rarely learning to cook or do housework. Many can barely boil an egg even now, let alone prepare a meal. “There’s a cultural expectation that the wives of Boomers would still be housewives,” adds Seaton. “That was ingrained in the education system in the years after the war when boys would do woodwork and girls would do housekeeping at school. Boomer men are products of the world they grew up in.”

3. Those bloody Swinging 60s

As Boomers never tire of saying, they came of age in the Swinging 60s, officially the best decade to be young in the history of recorded time. Although the myths of the 1960s that emerged from small pockets of bohemia in big cities obscure the rather more prosaic reality experienced by the majority of Boomers, it was a time that placed men in a perfect storm of social and cultural advantages.

Boomers were raised with more freedom than young people before them so were able to rebel and express themselves as teenagers. Photo / 123rf

“Boomers were the first teenagers,” says Seaton. “People don’t refer to this age group as distinct until the Boomers. The majority are leaving school early and moving into jobs that are relatively well paid so they have disposable income. You see the idea of ‘rebellion’, especially the men who grow their hair long and experiment with drugs. Some historians say that is a reaction against the mid-century nuclear family, but it’s more likely that they were able to rebel and express themselves because they had in general been raised with more intimacy and freedom than young people before.”

Then, with a trad wife, they were king of their castles in homes that for the first time had fridges, TVs and a host of other mod cons. (It’s worth mentioning that this only applies to straight men – for gay men the opposite was usually the case, with homosexuality not legalised in the UK until 1967.)

Boomers didn’t have the expansive higher education options of today, such as a degree in Surf Science or Lady Gaga Studies. For all the assumptions about their freedoms, the length of time they had in “young adulthood” was a lot shorter than those enjoyed by indulged Millennials and Gen Z. They married young, left home young, started work earlier, usually didn’t go to university and didn’t go travelling. In that sense their lives are a mirror image – though arguably a more productive one – of their grandchildren.

4. Even their worst decade was good

“Economics is so important in this story,” says Seaton. “Boomers come of age at an exceptional moment in Western capitalism between the 1940s and 1970s, often referred to as the golden age of capitalism. You have GDP growth regularly over 3% per year, average weekly earnings double between 1945 and 1960 at a time when new consumer items are becoming available and they are maturing into that world. There was more leisure time. You could quit your job and just find another one; there wasn’t that degree of insecurity that followed from the end of the 20th century. That enables forms of cultural expression and rebellion that wouldn’t have been possible earlier.”

Not only did they grow up in a time of a pop culture revolution, but Boomer men also enjoyed an era of full employment in the 1960s in which the average house cost just over £2000 (about £64,000 [$141,000] in today’s money). A common Boomer response to gripes about Britain’s current cost of living crisis was to remind youngsters how tough the 1970s were. There was a lot wrong with that messy, strike-added decade, but hang on a minute: if Boomers were not in a position to buy a house until the early 1970s, the average house price was £4400. By the end of the decade, it was still only in the region of £22,000. With this came the high probability of paying off your mortgage before retirement and all the opportunities that provided. For those who couldn’t, there was a huge stock of council housing to fall back on. Wages were high (they had to be to keep up with inflation) but inequality was at its lowest.

5. They had a second golden age

Any Boomer sensible enough to stick at the same job for long enough was rewarded with a final salary pension, a prospect that seems as fantastical today as a herd of unicorns or an arrest for shoplifting. It wasn’t just that final salary pensions were generous – they were reassuring, affording Boomer men yet another massive financial and psychological boon denied for future generations.

Boomers had generous final salary pensions. Photo / 123rf

Even in maturity, Boomer men have the agency to change the lives of those around them, if they can drag themselves away from another repeat of Secret Nazi Bases and Bangers and Cash. The combination of a lifetime’s hard work and good luck mean they are now in a position to bask in the glory of their own largesse. “House prices have been the biggest battleground between Boomers and Millennials, but a lot of Boomers are now handing down money to Millennial children and grandchildren so they can get on the property ladder,” says Seaton. “Younger generations are sharing the benefits.”

So rather than complaining that Boomer men have had it easy all their lives, the sensible option for Millennials and Gen Z is probably just to be very nice to them, especially if they’re sitting on a cottage or a nice big townhouse. Their good fortune could end up being yours.