Hidden Within: Understanding the Inner Child in Baby Boomers

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-446-4_7How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Inner Child; Baby Boomers; Childhood Experiences

Abstract

The study examines the concept of the “inner child” of baby boomers and, in so doing, begins to unravel how childhood experience is influential for mental and emotional outcomes later in life. The baby boomers refer, generationally, to persons born between 1945 and 1964. This generation grew up during an era of massive social change, with traditional parental practices and poor awareness of mental health issues often at play. In this regard, it is proposed that an examination of psychological dimensions, measurement tool developed by Kartasasmita et al. (2023), which assesses six dimensions of inner child-related behaviors. The data from 387 baby boomers revealed an average score of 2.5462 (SD = 0.52443), showing lack of normality distribution in accordance with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (< 0.001). Meanwhile, the strongest of these findings were for “Trauma-Related Behavior” (mean = 2. 9367) and “Childhood Attachment Issues” (mean = 2.7041), suggesting the enduring significance of early life experiences. Recovery efforts and modalities aimed at emotional healing and reconciling with one’s inner child are thus reinforced in their radius. Because baby boomers are getting set to enter old age, downright interventions to address unfinished business from their childhoods are increasingly becoming vital to benefit mental health and emotional well-being. This study broadens our understanding of the long-term psychosocial implications of early experiences, highlighting the need for integrative approaches toward mental health in conjunction with this specific cohort.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jelien Afendi
AU  - Ninawati Ninawati
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/07/22
TI  - Hidden Within: Understanding the Inner Child in Baby Boomers
BT  - Proceedings of the Tarumanagara International Conference on the Applications of Social Sciences and Humanities (TICASH 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 54
EP  - 61
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-446-4_7
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-446-4_7
ID  - Afendi2025
ER  -