

In China, boomers lived through the Cultural Revolution and were subject to the one-child policy as adults. In many countries, this period was one of deep political instability due to the postwar youth bulge. In the 1960s and 1970s, as this relatively large number of young people entered their teens and young adulthood-the oldest turned 18 in 1964-they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort, and the social movements brought about by their size in numbers, such as the counterculture of the 1960s and its backlash. In the West, boomers' childhoods in the 1950s and 1960s had significant reforms in education, both as part of the ideological confrontation that was the Cold War, and as a continuation of the interwar period.

Most baby boomers are children of either the Greatest Generation or the Silent Generation, and are often parents of Gen Xers and Millennials, or Generation Z. The baby boom has been described variously as a "shockwave" and as "the pig in the python". The dates, the demographic context, and the cultural identifiers may vary by country. The generation is often defined as people born from 1946 to 1964 during the mid-20th century baby boom. Baby boomers, often shortened to boomers, are the demographic cohort following the Silent Generation and preceding Generation X.
