(9 of 12)
Baby Boomer parents, it must be admitted, can be almost as obsessive about children as they were about sex and still are about real estate. Romanticizing their little creations, they have scorned traditional names like Bob and Mary Sue in favor of more precious monikers like Justin and Kimberly. Keenly aware of the terrible competition that they had faced for college admission and jobs, Baby Boomer parents often start their children on absurdly premature cram courses for the college boards, turning out pint-size superachievers stuffed with scientific nostrums and violin lessons. It would be no small irony, of course, if their children responded to the pressure by turning into adolescent rebels--just like their parents.
Now that the Baby Boomers are beginning to create families, will they begin to care for others as well? Will they undertake the obligations of citizenship as well as parenthood? It is hard to look at the Boomers, moving back to the suburbs they once described as soulless, struggling to pay off their inflated mortgages, and detect any ground swell of public activism. The Boomers themselves admit this: in the TIME Yankelovich poll, 69% of 30- to 40- year-olds said they do not feel that they are as politically active as they should be. Yet small, perhaps telling signs of renewed social conscience are abroad in the land. The personal odyssey of Joyce Maynard, 32, is one:
Maynard was noticed before she turned 20. A precocious New York Times Magazine article she wrote in 1972 titled "An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life" made her a minor figure of her generation and led to a frenetic reporting job on the Times after a year at Yale. Only a year later, however, she fled the bright lights and big city and moved to New Hampshire. Married, living in an old farmhouse at the end of a dirt road, she began baking pies and making babies. "I dropped out," she says. "I wanted to do nothing but raise three children, make a good life for them and preserve their safety and sanity as we moved into the 21st century." But three months ago, she says with a sigh, "the (Federal) Government announced that it has chosen my town as a proposed nuclear waste dump site."
Now, says Maynard, "I do nothing but talk about nuclear waste all day long. I have come to realize there is no way to tend just one's own backyard. There is no escape, even in New Hampshire." Her children are not always understanding of Mom's new obsession. "On my daughter's eighth birthday," she reports, "the first thing she said when she got up was 'Mommy, can I please not hear the word nuclear all day?' They see I'm not baking pies, the house is looking a mess, but I'm a different kind of mother now. I have to be a mother and a good citizen."
There is a social conscience to be tapped in the Baby Boomers, asserts Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, 42. "But at the moment it is nascent. It * has yet to be rekindled." Not a few politicians are casting about for ways to fan the embers of Boomer activism. The under-40 generation represents some 60% of the electorate, and a leader who wins its allegiance could easily land in the White House. "If you could find the right formula," says Senator Gore, "you'd unlock an awful lot of energy."