During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the American family faced a war at home: the conflict between the conservative older generation and their rebellious offspring. Parents and teenage children often took radically different views of politics, the Vietnam war, drugs, sex, music, and many other issues that define the era.

Today, the generation gap has all but vanished. Boomer parents and their "Millennial Generation" children share many of the same attitudes, tastes, and values.

Let’s examine the facts underlying this trend and its implications.

The gulf that existed between the values of parents and the children of the 1960s and early 1970s still exists in the minds of many of those children, who are now grown with teenaged children of their own.

Those Boomer parents watched their children grow up with a sense of dread, expecting the inevitable conflict when the values of the new generation clashed with their own. But to their amazement, that conflict hasn't erupted.

For the most part, children born since 1980 and their parents think and act remarkably alike. In the 1960s, fathers who sat at the dinner table in business suits frowned at teenage sons who were clad in jeans and t-shirts. Today, both generations are likely to be dressed casually.

Similarly, the gap in cultural tastes 30 years ago was symbolized by the parents' preference for Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, while their children listened to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Today, both generations are likely to listen to the Rolling Stones and newer acts that span both generations, such as Sheryl Crow.

Beyond these similarities, the younger generation has also impressed researchers as being more civic-minded than Generation X. This group, known as the Millennials, were born after 1980. They are nearly as large as the Boomer generation of about 76 million, and they can also look forward to more opportunities than Gen X.

And, unlike the Gen Xers, who had to compete for jobs with Boomers who were laid off during the 1991 economic recession, Millennials enter the job market at a time of lower unemployment. The outlook is even brighter in the years ahead.

As we noted in the first issue of Trends, "Based on projections from the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, our economy will create a demand for 10 million more...