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
if you’re a later mom you’ll also likely be a later grandma and maybe not see your grandkids if your kids have kids later too. This is not my worry, but hey, to each her own.
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.
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.
The biggest salary gains were for women who had invested some of the delay time in getting an advanced degree and then went on to establish at work before having kids.
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.
Childless women of all ages are under assault. If you’re a teenager, you’re pushed toward motherhood by “moralizers.” If you’re a woman 35 or older, you’re subject to ominous news stories creating fertility anxiety. Lately the anxiety peddlers have been expanding their targeted danger zone to include women in their late 20s and early 30s.