I am continuing to discuss the Barbara Dafoe Whitehead/David Popenoe report entitled The State of Our Unions, The Social Health of Marriage in America 2006, Essay: Life Without Children.
I make this particular post because I find the report’s observations on women and childlessness to be interesting and provocative. I’m not entirely sure what to make of them.
The report notes, “most women still want to have at least one child and, ideally, two. In fact, 68 percent of Gen X women today are likely to say that having a child is an experience every woman should have compared to just 45 percent of baby boom women in 1979.”
Perhaps the 1979 figure is attributable to the phenomenon of radical forms of feminism more popular in that day. The Gen X figure is corroborated by the widely cited Amercian Values report, which found that many college women continue to desire husbands and children, though the men in their midst pursue them for these reasons with far less frequency.
The report notes that one reason for the decline in childbirth rates is that the median age of first marriage for women was not quite 21 in 1970 and today it is just shy of 26. For women who hold a four-year college degree (an increasing percentage of the female population) the age of first marriage is even higher.
Secondly, after marriage, women tend to wait longer before they bear their first child. In 1960, 71 percent of married women had a first birth within the first three years of marriage. By 1990, the percentage had fallen to 37. By 2000, the majority of women had not started raising children prior to being in their thirties. In 2004, almost one out of five women in their early forties were childless compared to one out of ten in 1976.
(HT: Why Family Matters)