in my honkey US experience...

I think for many, it is a reaction to their own children not respecting them/their views, and then having no concrete counter argument to why their views should be respected.

I also think they know they sacrificed a hell of a lot less, materially, than their own parents did for them.

also, lead poisoning.

their parents all traumatized them.

people online act like boomers were singularly awful. their parents and grandparents were bullshit too.

Because most of them were pushed into having kids by their families/society at large, without definitively wanting them or having the faintest clue of the responsibility child-rearing entails

edit - also the lead poisoning as others have said

Same reason so many of them hate their spouses. They didn't do it because they wanted to, they did it because it's what society told them to do. Somehow, life was supposed to work out for them between the job they hate, the spouse they hate, the house in a place they hate, and the children they planted the seeds of mutual resentment in. After all, it worked out alright for their parents (debatable) and their grandparents (that the early 1900's was practically alien never occurs to them)

The primary answer to why boomers are the way they are is always lead poisoning

Most people (even Marxists) tend not to like deceptively simple answers to complex questions, but in this case it's true

Between the 1920s and 1970s hundreds of millions of people around the globe were permanently brained damaged by one of the most acute neurotoxins known to humankind, a toxin that after wrecking childhood havoc on the brain and nervous system accumulates within the bones of poisoned people as they age, as these people get older their bones get softer and more opaque which releases the accumulated toxin back into their system for a second time

This life-time medical condition is super-charged by the burdens of capitalism and the aftermath of WW2 leading to a genuinely stunted generation of human beings

They were probably the first generation where...

1: having children was more of an economic burden than a benefit.

2: easy means of avoiding having children existed and were generally available.

3: social pressure to have kids was still strong enough to override 1 and 2.

So you have a bunch of people peer pressure into making an easily avoidable choice to take on a massive burden.

I also want to add suburbs in addition. White fence cul-de-sac suburbs are a very uniquely socially isolating environment that harms people.

I agree that they had kids they didn't actually want because of social pressure. My parents chose to have 3 of us, even though neither of them liked kids. They'd complain constantly about how horrible kids are, and how awful it is to be a parent. When we'd go to family gatherings, my mom and her sisters would stand around and talk right in front of us about how much they hated motherhood, and how "of course, no one really likes kids." Her closest sister always seemed angry that she had to be around a bunch of kids, but she chose to have those kids. It never made any sense to me. My mom's parents were physically abusive under the guise of "discipline," and I think it damaged her and her siblings psychologically. I'm not sure they know what love is, or that they're capable of feeling it.

At least in my experience, boomers view their children as property. Property-children shouldn't have beliefs or do things the parents don't want any more than one would expect a folding chair to suddenly become communist.

Because Boomers' parents were probably the greatest generation of human beings to ever live and they hated their Boomer offspring (for a good reason). Unfortunately, Boomers learned the wrong lessons from this and decided since they suffered, their kids should suffer, too.

Though I've noticed Gen X'ers have been harsher on their children than Boomers. That's probably just selection bias on my part.

Idk boomers are probably old enough to have gone to school with Laius and saw what his kid Oedipus did

they're jealous that they won't live to witness the end of complex life on earth