Baby Boomers are the reason why high school became so culturally relevant.
You had a large cohort of students coming of age together at a time when the country was wealthy enough where you had a class of people who had gone through puberty but wasn’t being given the full roles and responsibilities of being adults. This new separate age group between kids and adults was relatively novel.
You also started seeing a major change in cultural forces like music and cinema which catered to this set of consumers. This catering became very important as companies realized this was when adults formed a lot of their tastes and preferences. Cultural output started focusing on this age group as tastemakers.
One of my dementia care protips to new psych workers is that (since music is actually clinically proven to be calming), you can look at the age on their wristband and try whatever was popular when they were 15-25.
Baby Boomers are the reason why high school became so culturally relevant.
You had a large cohort of students coming of age together at a time when the country was wealthy enough where you had a class of people who had gone through puberty but wasn’t being given the full roles and responsibilities of being adults. This new separate age group between kids and adults was relatively novel.
You also started seeing a major change in cultural forces like music and cinema which catered to this set of consumers. This catering became very important as companies realized this was when adults formed a lot of their tastes and preferences. Cultural output started focusing on this age group as tastemakers.
Also, going forward, music tastes get stuck in high school years.
One of my dementia care protips to new psych workers is that (since music is actually clinically proven to be calming), you can look at the age on their wristband and try whatever was popular when they were 15-25.