SOCIAL ISSUES : Baby Boomers’ Own Boomlet Has Ended

The Baby Boomers’ baby boomlet has ended, the Census Bureau said Monday.

The number of births fell below 4 million in the United States last year for the first time since the late 1980s, and that number is expected to decline gradually for another decade.

The huge wave of children born in the two decades after World War II produced their own baby boomlet in the 1980s, but most of those Boomers are now beyond their child-bearing years, population experts say.

“If you figure that the Baby Boomers were born between 1946 and 1964, the youngest of them have now crossed age 30. And the bulk of births still take place before [women] reach 30,” said Stephen Goss, an actuarial expert at the Social Security Administration.

Last year, 3.95 million births were recorded, a 2.2% drop from the year before, the Census Bureau said.

The surge and ebb of the population flow is closely tracked by government analysts, school planners and marketing experts. While the 1980s produced a bumper crop of new babies, the 1990s saw a surge in school enrollments.

But population experts predict only a slight drop in the total number of births, because a mostly young generation of immigrants is having babies at a higher rate than native-born Americans.

The Baby Boom hit its peak in 1957, when 4.3 million children were born. Then, women on average were having about three children, versus about two today. In the 1960s the birthrate fell sharply and the total births hit a low point between 1973 and 1976 when about 3.1 million births were recorded per year.

For the coming decade, births should hover at about 3.9 million, before rising above 4 million after the year 2005, the bureau projects.

Despite the slight decline in births, the nation’s overall population continues to rise. On Jan. 1, the population stood at 261,638,000, says the Census Bureau. This represents an increase of 2.47 million during 1994, of which 816,000 were immigrants.

By the year 2050, the population will increase to a total of 392 million, the bureau projects.

Its report, “Population Profile of the United States--1995,” gives a statistical snapshot of the nation. It includes these highlights:

* The average American makes 11.7 moves in a lifetime. While one in six Americans moves to a new residence during the year, most stay in the same county.

* Slightly more than half of the women (53%) who had children in 1994 were in the work force.

* Texas, with a population of 18.4 million, became the nation’s second-most populous state in 1994 after California.

* California’s Latino population is expected to double between 1993 and 2020.

* Though it had the nation’s highest growth rate during the 1980s, California has dropped to 19th among the states in its growth rate during this decade.