a href=”http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gregory-birthrate-20110109,0,2745694.story”>Here’s a link to my op-ed today in the LA Times.
Tighter Belts, Later Bumps
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.