Id argue that the generation before the boomers were the worst parents. Most of them held pre-modern traditionalist views in a changing world, ptsd from wars, and of course the racism.
This is an interesting idea that needs some refinement.
You could be arguing about the GI Generation (1910s-early 1920s birth and generally the parents of earlier Boomers) or the Silent Generation (late 1920s-1945 births). Silent Generation parents had children that were either late Boomers, but were more commonly parents of the first 1/2 to 2/3rds of Generation X.
In terms of wars fought, the GI Generation was most commonly associated with fighting World War II. The earlier Silents fought in the Korean War and the later Silents fought in the Vietnam War.
Pre-modern traditionalist views would be more associated with the GI Generation than the Silent Generation. The Silent Generation was rapidly modernizing, as I'll expand upon in the next paragraph after some quick contextual thoughts. The Silent Generation gets a bit ignored in generational theory discussions for their contributions simply because it was a smaller generation. The core of the Silent Generation was born in the 1930s during a time of low fertility due to the Great Depression. People didn't want to have kids during the Great Depression because kids cost money and money was scarce during the Great Depression.
The Silent Generation was influential in following modernization trends....
- The birth control pill, growth in use of all contraception methods, and promiscuity
- No fault divorce
- Women entering the workplace in less traditionally female roles
The birth control pill launched in 1960. In 1960, the oldest Boomers were 14 years old. During most of the 1960s, the women using birth control pills were women who were members of the Silent Generation (1930s-early 1940s births). It really wasn't until the 1970s that more of the women using the birth control pill were Baby Boomers. Although the Silent Generation were the first users of birth control, their small size in numbers gets them overlooked in the birth control discussion.
The original use case for birth control was for established, monogamous couples to delay a pregnancy, but the younger Silents were starting to use it to be a little more promiscuous. The promiscuity of most women born in the late 1930s-1945 cannot be reasonably compared to women of later generation, though they really started the trend.
California became the first US state to have liberalized, no fault divorce laws starting in 1969. During the 1970s, most other US states liberalized their divorce laws following the model of California.
In the 1969-1975 era, most Boomers were either too young to be married or were in the earliest stages of marriage and yet to be unhappy enough to want to divorce. The earliest people who got divorced under the new, no-fault divorce laws were people from the Silent Generation. Once again, a modernization trend is started by the Silent Generation but truly gets associated with the Boomers due to the lack of size of the Silents.
With more divorce and more birth control/contraception and less emphasis on family life due to burgeoning Second Wave Feminism of the 1960s, more women starting entering the workplace in typically more masculine white collar roles. The first women to do this were Silent Generation women but the trend really accelerated in the early 1970s, when the oldest of the Boomer women were old enough to have entered the workplace and were starting to go to college and get bachelor's degrees in larger numbers.
Some of the best fictionalized portrayals of younger, Silent Generation adults occurred in the TV show "Mad Men". The classic Silent Generation characters in that show were Joan Holloway (b. 1931), Peter Campbell (b. 1934), and Peggy Olson (b. 1939).
