The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny

by William Strauss

Amid the gathering turbulence of 1964, baby making abruptly fell out of favor. In the spring of that year, American women were still giving birth at a record pace. But in the months that followed, conceptions plummeted—and by mid-1965 the U.S. fertility rate was entering its steep post-Boom decline. A national fertility study confirmed that a third of all mothers now admitted having at least one unwanted child. Stay-at-home moms began wearing buttons that read “Stop At One,” “None Is Fun,” and “Jesus Was an Only Child.” The reasons for this sudden turn included birth control pills, nascent feminism, and a new societywide hostility toward children. America’s new antichild attitude revealed itself most clearly in the media. By the mid-1960s, the production of smart-kid family sitcoms and creative-kid Disney movies slowed to a trickle. Replacing them was a new genre featuring unwanted, unlikable, or simply horrifying children. Rosemary’s Baby, a thriller about a woman pregnant with an evil demon, anchored a twenty-year period in which Hollywood filmed one bad-kid movie after another (The Exorcist, It’s Alive, The Omen, Halloween). Most came with sequels, since audiences couldn’t seem to get enough of these cinematic monsters. Moviegoers also lined up to see kids who were savages (Lord of the Flies), hucksters (Paper Moon), prostitutes (Taxi Driver), emotional misfits (Ordinary People), spoiled brats (Willie Wonka), and barriers to adult self-discovery (Kramer vs. Kramer).