A New Baby Boom?

More than four million babies were born in the U.S. last year, a record number. The last time the number was this high was in 1957, in the middle of the baby boom years; about 78 million Americans were born from 1946 to 1964.

"I suspect this is the beginning of a new kind of baby boom, although it's going to be nowhere near the baby boom of the 1950s or '60s," says demographer Arthur Nelson of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. "It will be sort of a boomlet."