Awful Busy: Single Moms, Childcare & the Paycheck Fairness Act

So how do we expand childcare access now?

One direct way would be to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. Just like in all those studies of women around the globe who will much more reliably spend extra cash on their kids than will the dads, if you put more money in American women’s pockets (as in, give them the raise that a fair wage would involve) and they’ll spend some important part of that on finding better care for their kids. A point you might make to your senators in the next week or two. Can the lame ducks fly?

Post-Fertile Boomers and the Birth Rate Drop

Fertility rates in the US have fallen slightly, and it happens that the birth rate is the lowest ever in the US. But the needs of the news cycle for drama notwithstanding, nothing drastic or frightening is happening on the fertility front this year. It’s just plain family planning.

Pay for Delay

In the US, delay of family is a common means of raising income – so as to have more to raise kids on when they do arrive. In the Indian program, the program adds a direct payment to the raised income that delay brings on its own.

Childlessness Up, Down and Steady: Parsing the New Pew Report

Childlessness and Later Fertility Here’s another later-fertility story from the Pew Research Center. Last month they confirmed our suspicion that there are indeed more older moms around. This month they report that fewer women are having kids. Both reports resonate

Planning Motherhood: The Pill and Socioeconomic Change

Up until recently, women’s work has been largely limited to bearing and rearing the workforce for free, because they had no other option. But when sex and babies cease to be directly linked, business and government risk losing their major underwriter—the moms, if they don’t offer of family-supportive policies for women who want to combine work and childrearing.

The New Demography of American Motherhood

Lots of news stories lately on the later motherhood trend, including this new report from the Pew Research Center that documents that in fact there are lots more older moms than twenty years ago, and fewer teen moms.
Ladies, and gentlemen, you heard it all here first — or maybe you heard it in your own circle of friends and relations — since all these stories are, after all, reporting on us, not on the pronatalist fantasies of screen writers and journalists.

Recession as Birth Control? Varies by Age.

Along with the recession, the drop may have something to do also with recognition, as the teen rate rose in 2006 and 2007, of problems with Ab-only ed — and moves in a number of states away from that.

Likewise, all the additional people who had babies in 2007 (that rise occurred in all age brackets except those 45+ and those 14 and under) were busy in 2008 — taking care of those kids. Demand in the baby realm is not infinite.

On the other hand, recession-based decisions against a baby today among folks who would have otherwise felt ready, will lead to further increases in births to older moms (and dads) down the line. Lots of ripple effects to all these social dynamics.

Domestic Product

Later Motherhood and the Politics & Economics of Women's Work

birth rates