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The disturbing by-product of the Baby Boomers' quest for personal freedom, for what the "human potential" gurus call self-realization, has been lack of commitment to others. In the 1979 movie Kramer vs. Kramer, Meryl Streep, playing the mother who wants to see more in life than a diaper rash, writes her young son, "I have gone away because I must find something interesting to do for myself in the world. Everybody has to and so do I. Being your Mommy was one thing, but there are other things too." The fact that she comes back later to try to reclaim her son only makes the movie a more wrenching testimonial to the conflicts that racked the Boom generation as it coped with adulthood in the '70s.
If their parents tended to regard happiness as an almost incidental by- product of living by the accepted values of hard work and family obligation, the Baby Boomers have relentlessly pursued happiness as an end in itself. Few found it in the dizzying array of self-help movements like est or cults like Synanon and Scientology, which proliferated like weeds in the 1970s. Nor was the sexual revolution the answer. "Casual encounters and open sex left most Baby Boomers with a sense of emptiness, of personal isolation and loneliness," says University of Chicago Psychologist Froma Walsh. The spread of herpes and AIDS in the mid-'80s further diminished wandering lust.
Today many Baby Boomers have renounced the lonely pursuit of self. Increasingly, they are groping to find a sense of worth in selflessness. The gurus and cult leaders are hard up for new recruits these days; the divorce rate appears even to have slipped a little. Though church attendance rates have not increased noticeably, some Baby Boomers speak of a "new spiritualism" and grope, often privately and quietly, to regain the faith they lost in the secular '60s and '70s. In the '80s the Baby Boomers are not exactly generating a new Baby Boom of their own--the total fertility rate remains a low 1.8 births per woman. But because of the sheer number of Boomers who have finally decided to procreate, parks are full of strollers again, and many neighborhood schools, darkened during the baby bust of the '70s, are once more crowded and noisy.
For men, playing Mr. Mom has meant more than learning the way to Toys R Us. They have discovered, somewhat to their surprise, the private joys of daily child rearing that women have always known. In the Yankelovich poll for TIME, 63% of 30- to 40-year-olds stated that "raising children is a main satisfaction in my life." Revering and caring for children has served as an antidote to some of the egocentric tendencies of the Me generation. "We were taught that we were the most important people in the world," says Columnist Greene, who became a father at age 35. "If you have a child, someone is more important than you."