Let me start by saying I would like to see a study on American parenthood. But the good folks at the Pew Research Center do much to help us understand our world, and their recent study on American motherhood is no exception. Their findings have plenty of bearing on the national trend towards only children, primarily for the later age at which women are having their first kids.
Says the study’s authors, “The demography of motherhood in the United States has shifted strikingly in the past two decades. Compared with mothers of newborns in 1990, today’s mothers of newborns are older and better educated.”
1. The more education a woman has, the later she tends to marry and have children.
2. The number of women having a kid at ages 40 and older has tripled since 1990.
3. Among parents who say they don’t plan to have more children, the most cited reasons are wanting to have time for the children [or child?, I interject] they already have (76%) or concerns about the cost of raising a child (72%).
4. A third of adults who have three or more children say two is ideal. And this is especially interesting: an additional 2% of mothers of three or more say just one kid is ideal.
5. But still, when Americans are asked what is the ideal number of children for a family, the most popular answer is “two” — as it has been since the 1970s.
The entire report is fascinating. You can peruse the whole shebang here:
The New Demography of American Motherhood – Pew Research Center.
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