From my understanding each generation should be 18 years
Boomer: 1945-1963
Gen x : 1963-1981
Gen y: 1981-1999
Gen a: 1999-2017
However I see on a lot of sites people have the Gen x range to be 20 years and Gen y to be 15
In: Biology
IMO, we really only have three definable generations. The easiest to define is baby boomers: children whose parents were either involved in WWII, or delayed starting a family until WWII was over. Their parents, I call “Silvers” because, IMO, “The Greatest Generation” is total BS. Say what you will about Boomer parents, they did a hell of a lot better with their kids than their parents did with them.
Millennials, naturally, are Boomers’ children. It makes far more sense to define me and my cousins as Millennials, even though a third of us were born before 1980. Almost the whole extended family started pretty young.
Gen X gets forgotten / ignored because, relative to Boomers and Millennials, they’re just such a tiny demographic. Their grandparents started families *during* World War II, which was a small minority position.
Gen Z can only be fairly defined as “post-Millennial”. The spread of ages there is so wide, trying to assign an age range is pointless. Having great-grandparents involved in WWII is almost irrelevant to you culturally.
There’s really nothing scientific to back up the “every 20 years” generational theory. It happens to line up with the population booms that happen after a big war, but the effect only lasts 2 generations at most. Parents might start having kids immediately after the war, or wait a few years, and they might continue having children for a long time afterwards. Every subsequent generation amplifies the age range. Before long, the year you were born has a larger impact on the culture you grew up in than whether your parents or grandparents were part of some singular, significant world event, such as WWII.
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