AREN'T THEY THROUGH THE PYTHON YET?:

Look Who's Parenting (ANN HULBERT, 7/04/04, NY Times Magazine)

When my seventh grader confided that she loves the ''Moms have changed'' ad for the Nissan Quest minivan, which features sporty 30-somethings ready for fun, I think it was her tactful way of letting me know I'm an old-model mother. She's right that the baby-boomer brand of parent no longer predominates. According to ''Generation X Parents: From Grunge to Grown Up,'' a study recently published by the Boston marketing-strategy firm Reach Advisors, more than half (51 percent, to be exact) of kids under 18 now have mothers and fathers who were born between 1965 and 1979, the cohort once known as ''slackers.'' And if there's one thing these Gen-X parents can't stand, the strategists report, it's the boomer ''soccer mom'' label and the bossy bustling it connotes. Nissan has gotten the message: ''More sunlight for kids. More moonlight for parents,'' promises another Quest ad (touting the Skyview roof). Sounds lovely -- leisurely, cozy, even sexy -- doesn't it?

To judge by the study, ''baby busters'' (another tag for the post-boomers) have turned into family boosters who make their elders look not exactly like slackers, but not like patient nurturers either. Reach Advisors' 2003 survey of 3,020 parents (supplemented by their analyses of government data) found that twice as many Gen-X mothers as boomer mothers spent more than 12 hours a day ''attending to child-rearing and household responsibilities.'' Roughly half of Gen-X fathers devoted three to six hours a day to domesticity; only 39 percent of baby-boomer dads could say the same. What's more, boomers were content with their (comparatively meager) quota of kid time -- unlike their successors. Who would have guessed that the supposed cynical drifters of the 1980's would be complaining about too little time with the children? (The contrasts between parents, Reach Advisors emphasizes, do not hinge on the age of the kids.)

The strategists call the Gen-X homebody mentality a ''backlash.''

It's a shame we had to endure the 60s and 70s (with the exception of the 1969 Mets World Series Championship) but if we were to have a ferocious enough backlash against all the damage the boomers did we could at least get back to a 50s America. One of the little recognized fruits of our astounding immigration and birth rates is that the young here--unlike in Europe and Japan--have sufficient political power to prevent the elderly (and the Boomers wiull be a big crop of elderly) from taking the country with them to the grave.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 5, 2004 8:40 AM