
The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America - jessaustin
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html
======
DoreenMichele
I attended college part-time and intermittently while my kids were somewhat
young. My first full-time job at age 41 was a corporate job that paid above
minimum wage. (I have been told that expecting better than minimum wage when
starting work so late in life is crazy talk. So I think I did well.)

I think the US desperately needs a "mommy track" for college that encourages
women with young kids to go to school part-time and take 6 to 8 years to
complete their degree. I think this would solve a lot of problems.

Waiting too long to have kids can involve problems for both mother and child.
(Among other things) An older mom can require fertility treatments to get
pregnant at all and there is higher risk of certain birth defects in the
child.

Historically, we resolved these conflicts by having women have babies young,
but with a financially established husband who was typically older. Now, that
is decried as evil patriarchy.

I'm well aware of the downside of having kids young and being a homemaker a
long time. I'm divorced after having been a homemaker and full-time mom for a
lot of years. But my problems were compounded by various factors.

I'm quite confident that one of the smartest things I did was go to school
when I could. I have thought for years that we should foster young moms
pursuing their education. But I have no idea at all how to start such a
movement, for lack of a better word.

~~~
whorleater
>Waiting too long to have kids can involve problems for both mother and child.
(Among other things) An older mom can require fertility treatments to get
pregnant at all and there is higher risk of certain birth defects in the
child.

This seems like it's stretching the article though, the average age of birth
for women with college degrees (currently) is ~30. While that's certainly
older than the non-college degrees, it's still well below the 35 cutoff which
most people seem to regard as when birth complications becomes a serious risk.

~~~
DoreenMichele
My sister and I were both STAR Student (highest SAT score in our graduating
high school class, top 20% GPA) and won National Merit Scholarships to UGA,
one of the top two colleges in our home state. She took her scholarship and
got her degree. I turned mine down, got married at age 19 to another 19 year
old and spent two decades as a homemaker.

My sister began trying to have kids in her late twenties. She was 36 iirc when
she finally had her only child. She has also miscarried multiple times.

She and I are no longer close, but we were at one time. We talked about the
possibility of me serving as her surrogate if she couldn't have a child on her
own.

Through her, I know quite a lot about fertility issues. I don't think I'm
stretching anything. More like giving the nutshell version of many decades of
knowledge.

~~~
whorleater
>Through her, I know quite a lot about fertility issues.

I empathize with your sister, but I think it's wrong to generalize a single
data point over the population. On a broad level, birth rates in the US from
25-29 are at 104.3, whereas 30-34 is at 101.5[1]. This _is_ a change, but far
less in comparison to the dropoff at 35-39, where birth rates fall off a cliff
to 51.8.

If we take the article's premise at face value (college educated women in
current times typically give birth at ~30 years old, vs non-college educated
women at ~23), it would appear that the birth rate differences are negligible.

[1]: [https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/NCHS-Birth-Rates-for-Females-by-
Ag...](https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/NCHS-Birth-Rates-for-Females-by-Age-Group-
United-S/yt7u-eiyg)

~~~
patrickg_zill
It's absolutely the case that it is easier for a younger woman to get pregnant
than an older one (talking about a scale of years) .

Fertility doesn't decline in a linear fashion but it does decline and to my
knowledge, it doesn't ever increase over time.

I think you need to reexamine what the stats you are quoting are really about.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I think it could increase, if someone gave up smoking, drinking, started
eating non-junk and sleeping.

Haven’t looked at the science tho.

------
DanielleMolloy
Ideological indoctrination aside, it may suprise some people here that the
german GDR had 92% working women, many of them in technical and scientific
fields and many having three children. One of the things they did right here
is offering proper childcare widely around typical work time windows. The
society and often husbands too felt responsible for children, it was not seen
as "a mother's thing" like many in this thread seem to do. This has
implications up until today, with several prominent and well-educated female
politicians and public figures being GDR-born. It was not all perfect
(housework and childcare was implicitly still seen as a mother's thing,
mothers could request special housework days, sometimes questionable things
like full-week kindergardens and so on), but much better than what young
people face today when moving to west-german states (where the jobs for
educated people can be found) where old-fashioned mindsets and kindergardens
closing at 4pm and at random full days throughout the month persist. A single
generation of children born among both men and women working in decent jobs
did this.

Angela Merkel is one of these GDR children, she studied physics and has a PhD
in quantum chemistry. She is childless, but her mother - despite being very
old now - is still teaching English because she has never stopped being
passionate about her chosen profession (I know an interview where Merkel says
that her mothers work attitude always inspired her). Well, she never had to
throw her education away because society or her husband expected it either.
Another well-known politician I can think of here is Sarah Wagenknecht. Peter
Scholze who just won the Fields medal was born in Dresden (growing up in
Berlin) - his father is a physicist and his mother is a computer scientist
working as network technician.

~~~
Arete31415
I work in a technical field in the US, and my few female co-workers are
supposedly in a great position compared to other women in the US. They've got
good educations, and make good incomes. However, when it comes time for them
to have kids, they still have to scramble around and cobble together a
solution that is tedious _and_ expensive _and_ stressful. Every family in
America has to figure out how to arrange childcare, as if this whole "people
have children" thing is just a brand-new concept that no one else has tried
out before.

When government decides that it has zero responsibilities towards helping the
next generation, and when the cost of living (and the cost of educating that
next generation) is so darn high, women make the completely rational choice
not to have children, or to have fewer than they would otherwise like.

America found a way to offer childcare during WWII, when keeping women in work
was a priority. But somehow we've forgotten how to do it in peacetime.

~~~
nojvek
Probably not a popular opinion. With the world reaching ~10 billion in
population, wouldn’t some in the govt see not offering child care, a good
thing for the planet since it side effect encourages people to have less kids?

------
jawns
One of the other interesting implications of this gap, which is mostly
attributable to education, is that it leads to far more income inequality,
which in turn leads to a host of nasty problems. For instance, as the divide
between the haves and the have-nots becomes wider, it becomes harder to change
one's station in life, leading to cycles of poverty.

In previous generations, people were more likely to marry outside of their
education level and their family's economic class. So you might get a solidly
middle-class, white-collar guy marrying a woman from a working-class family
who never went to college, and they lived off one income.

But nowadays, it is much more likely that both spouses work, and also that
people marry within their own class and education level. So, in general, you
get either two low-income earners, two middle-income earners, or two high-
income earners.

That greatly widens the household income gap, because now you're dealing with
a combination of two incomes of roughly the same degree.

And so it becomes much harder for people to make changes to their economic
status, because dual-income households are the norm, and if both spouses have
to work, they have less time and opportunity, particularly at the lower end,
to do things (like earn a degree) that might help them improve their economic
status.

~~~
nugget
This is sometimes referred to as "assortive mating". In the 1970s, a male
executive was more likely to marry his secretary and a male doctor was more
likely to marry a nurse, and nobody would think that unusual. Culturally we
have shifted away from those norms and nowadays the executive marries another
executive or white collar professional and the doctor marries another doctor.
This reinforces inequality in many ways (income, culture, parental education
and involvement.) There don't seem to be any clear answers for how to address
the implications of this trend.

~~~
watwut
Secretary and nurse were pretty high far enough for women and neither could
progress much further.

Isn't it then still educated men marrying educated women relative to gender
possibilities? The different seem to be only that women had lower level of
education in general.

A men at that time would only rarely marry up.

~~~
gowld
Possibly, but the glass ceiling had a side effect of reducing discrimination
on the basis of, shall we say "potential to reach a higher level of
education/achievement".

~~~
watwut
How does glass ceiling reduces discriminarion? I don't get it.

------
dzdt
Its amazing to me that the distribution of first time motherhood age is
_bimodal_. Are we really at the point where the college track is so far
seperated? I would have expected enough in-between variations to keep the
distribution single-humped.

This makes me worried about the implications. There ought to be middle tracks,
to have kids and a career without putting one aside so long or to such a great
extent.

~~~
zaroth
Raising kids takes an infinite amount of time and resources.

Or to put it another way, the ROI of investing additional time into raising
your children remains high as you go from spending 5 minutes a day up to 1,000
minutes a day.

So I think it’s natural and beneficial that parents try to invest the maximum
amount of time into their children as physically possible, and career will
come second to that.

I’m not at all saying the choice shouldn’t be available to work and raise
children, or passing any moral judgement on families who take that path. Just
that it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of people decide they will focus on one
_or_ the other and not try to do both.

Advancing in a career and parenting a child are both extremely onerous (and
rewarding) tasks. There are only 24 hours in a day, and in both employment and
parenthood you are “competing” against other people who are 100% committed to
one or the other.

Speaking for myself as a 36 year old male, the number of hours I work is
probably 50% what it was before I had my two children. I used to be the #1
contributor at my job, no task couldn’t be done, no customer couldn’t be blown
away, no deal couldn’t be closed through mastery and shear force of will.

Now my priorities have shifted. That level of focus and exertion simply isn’t
possible anymore with the number of hours a day I spend with the kids.

~~~
defen
> Or to put it another way, the ROI of investing additional time into raising
> your children remains high as you go from spending 5 minutes a day up to
> 1,000 minutes a day.

Do you mean ROI for the parent (satisfaction of spending time with your child)
or for the child? It seems counter-intuitive but I believe a lot of research
has shown that upbringing actually doesn't matter too much, provided you meet
a certain obvious threshold (giving them proper food, not abusing them, etc)

Source: [https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-
Kids/dp/046...](https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-
Kids/dp/0465028616)

~~~
mjevans
I can't think of any study offhand, but I hypothesize that the ROI to society
long term favors parents that are there to support their children and do a
good job of it, not merely an adequate one.

------
lainga
In the map of motherhood ages for married, college-educated women, there seems
to be a band stretching from El Paso, through OK and KY, and ending in West
Virginia, where the average age is much lower. It's strongest around the
Oklahoma-Arkansas border. Is there a name for this region? It doesn't look
like it coincides with any of the "belts" I am familiar with (Bible belt, Rust
belt, Black belt, ...)

~~~
danielvf
What you are seeing is what's left of the Bible belt when you subtract out the
heavily African American regions out.

[http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_nhblack.html](http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_nhblack.html)

That's my big gripe with the NYT article and charts - these would be
considerably more informative if they were also broken down by race. As it is,
the real story is incredibly blurred.

~~~
bilbo0s
Why does race matter for calculating when married or college educated women
have babies?

Serious question. I'm genuinely wondering what it means in all of this?

~~~
fipple
21 year old black mothers are likely to be unmarried without college degrees.
21 year old white mothers are likely to be married and are likely to hold or
someday hold a college degree. They’re two entirely different populations and
scenarios which get jumbled together when you average them.

Its like if you asked “what’s the average height of the most popular American
Olympic athletes?” And found that the answer is 5 foot 6. Huh, they’re just
like us? No, the gymnasts are 4 foot 8 and the swimmers are 6 foot 4.

~~~
bilbo0s
???

That's still a bit confusing. Maybe I'm being dense, but one chart is for
women with college degrees having babies and the other is for women without
college degrees having babies.

So what impact would race have on when a woman with a college degree has a
baby? (I mean, whether they are married or not is presumably irrelevant to the
question of whether they have a college degree. So why would race _not_ be
irrelevant to that question?)

My question is the similar for the graph of married vs unmarried? If you are
married and having a baby, (I mean, unless I'm missing something?), you are
married and having a baby. Why would your race change that fact?

~~~
danielvf
[edit: probably wrong, see below]

Great question. If married/college were the only relevant factors, it would
not matter. However, there are cultural differences beyond just those.

Black women in the US do go to college at approximately the same rate as the
rest of the US population, however they are far less likely to study STEM
subjects, nor go to graduate school school, and are more likely to be going to
a lower tier of school.

Also, even college educated black women are far less likely to be married or
in long term relationships.

~~~
bilbo0s
???

But the charts are not counting women who have college degrees AND are
married. The chart is a count of women who have college degrees and had their
first child. So whether or not a college educated black or hispanic woman is
married, is totally irrelevant to that question.

I'm starting to think that, perhaps, you have misread the graphs? These are
not graphs of women who are college educated AND married. These are graphs of
women who are college educated. And then there is another set of graphs for
women who are married. With both factors isolated to get a true picture of
what's going on.

~~~
danielvf
You are correct, I was misreading the graphs - I'll have to rethink things!

------
akshayB
2008 financial collapse showed how important it is to have a career and also
showed how important it is for women to get educated and move forward as
contributors in household finances. There are lot of other factors at play
here like student loans, financial independence and 4-6 year time frame to get
college degree.

~~~
fein
It's almost like forcing women into industry careers, thus increasing the
number of workers in the workforce, leads to wage suppression and damages the
family structure...

Housewife is a fine career, one more worthy of praise than most college
degrees.

~~~
arandr0x
It's not. It's hard to find a second job in that career once you get laid off,
for once. There's no labor law restricting your work hours. And you never get
a vacation.

~~~
dudul
How do you get laid off?

~~~
ksenzee
Your kids grow up and move away. No grandkids yet, and your kids live in
another state now anyway. There's nothing much left for you to do during the
day, and it's lonely.

~~~
fein
So you spend time doing things with friends around town? this is basically
retirement age as is, when you'd have the exact same scenario if retired.

------
klenwell
Economics are an obvious factor in explaining the gap. So are cultural
attitudes towards sex.

This New Yorker article from 2008 digs into the political/cultural factors
behind it:

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/03/red-sex-
blue-s...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/03/red-sex-blue-sex)

 _Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and
education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct “middle-
class morality” taking shape among economically and socially advantaged
families who are not social conservatives. In Regnerus’s survey, the teen-
agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of
contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it.
Regnerus writes, “They are interested in remaining free from the burden of
teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted
diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college,
advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake.
Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.” These are the kids who tend to
score high on measures of “strategic orientation”—how analytical, methodical,
and fact-seeking they are when making decisions. Because these teen-agers see
abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before
marriage—just careful about it. Accordingly, they might delay intercourse in
favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the idea of remaining “technical
virgins” but because they assess it as a safer option._

~~~
jobigoud
These may explain the _range_ but the not really the gap.

------
aj7
Remarkably, the green areas [older first births] track America’s progressive
strongholds perfectly. Theories?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Remarkably, the green areas [older first births] track America’s progressive
> strongholds perfectly. Theories?

The article points out the factor that is a near complete explanation:
education.

------
YinglingLight
Personally, I'm investing in fertility companies/pharmaceuticals.

~~~
EGreg
I didn’t downvote you. I think this is a relevant comment. What companies have
you invested in and aren’t you worried about overpopulation?

~~~
bobmarley1
Malthusian overpopulation stopped being a serious scientific theory years ago.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth)

~~~
overkalix
> And if, but only if, we invest in the right green technology

Key sentence of the presentation. Population overshoot is a fact.

------
sunseb
We are 7.6 billion people - who want a job, a house, a car, that eat meat,
that want to travel the world. It's a zero sum game. I think it's a good thing
that people have less babies. (I am 33 years old, I am in a relationship, we
don't want kids, and it's ok, you can contribute to the world without having
kids.)

~~~
Denzel
Please explain to me how anything you said leads to the conclusion "it's a
zero sum game". Literally, nothing of what you said even supports that
conclusion. I fear you don't understand what zero sum means or rather you
don't understand why it wouldn't apply in this case.

~~~
sunseb
Yes, that was a bad analogy, sorry. What I wanted to say really:
overpopulation is at the root of all the planet's troubles.

For example, "There’s a strong chance a third of all people on earth will be
African by 2100":

[https://qz.com/africa/1099546/population-growth-africans-
wil...](https://qz.com/africa/1099546/population-growth-africans-will-be-a-
third-of-all-people-on-earth-by-2100/)

What could go wrong ?

~~~
beat
You seem to be assuming that lines of growth continue in one direction
forever. They do not.

In 1900, the population of Sweden was about 5M, and the birth rate was 4.02
(which was already falling from its historic average of around 5.0). In the
19th century, 20% of the population fled to the US to escape famine. Today,
the population is around 10M, and the birth rate is 1.79. Sweden was pretty
typical of Europe, pre-WWI.

Would you have said "What could go wrong?" when talking about Europe's birth
rate and population growth a century ago? No? Then why be afraid of the same
pattern in Africa?

Population growth today is mostly a function of increased life expectancy and
drastically reduced child mortality rates. Low child mortality has led to
reduced birth rates everywhere, to the point where most industrialized nations
have negative growth (discounting immigration). The birth rate has already
leveled off globally. It will level off in Africa, too, and the population
will stabilize. A century from now, Africa will have zero population growth.

------
beat
I'm currently reading _Factfulness_ , and now I cringe whenever I see the word
"gap" used in headlines like this.

edit: Getting downvoted for this tells me that not enough people here are
reading _Factfulness_. Everyone who has read it knows what I'm talking about.

~~~
haste410
You're probably being downvoted for not explaining what the book taught you
that makes you cringe. Saying you read a book and now look down on some
common, innocuous matter comes off as pretentious if you don't bother to give
any insight.

~~~
beat
I'm pretty sure pretentiousness is not a cause for downvoting on HN, not from
my observation.

