Millennials Millennials Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the generational demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. There are no precise dates for when this cohort starts or ends; demographers and researchers typically use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years. Millennials are sometimes referred to as "echo boomers" due to a major surge in birth rates in the 1980s and 1990s, and because millennials are often the children of the baby boomers. Although millennial characteristics vary by region, depending on social and economic conditions,
Baby boomers of 1943-1960) reached a common retirement age in the United States: 66 years. An indication of the importance put on the impact of the boomer was the selection by "TIME" magazine of the Baby Boom Generation as its 1966 "Man of the Year." As Claire Raines points out in "Beyond Generation X", "never before in history had youth been so idealized as they were at this moment." When Generation X came along it had much to live up to according to Raines. Boomers are often associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, and the "second-wave" feminist