The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html

by jessaustin • 8 years ago

150 208 8 years ago

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

EGreg2• 8 years ago

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?

YinglingLight2• 8 years ago

When women get educated in a country, the 'overpopulation threat' becomes a comedic punchline in said country. Every. time.

cimmanom3• 8 years ago

Most people who get fertility treatments are struggling to have one child, or at most a second - which is still below replacement rate. Fertility treatments for people who waited too long to have kids isn't going to contribute to overpopulation.

In fact, if anything, by making it more viable to wait to have children until later in life, and thus increasing the age of first reproduction relative to lifespan (i.e. slowing the reproductive cycle), fertility treatments could contribute to a slowing of population growth.

beat10• 8 years ago

Overpopulation isn't an actual problem. The rate of new births has been steady for decades now, and will remain steady into the foreseeable future. There are about 2 billion children in the world now; the UN expects there will be about 2 billion children in 2100. The population growth we're seeing today is a result of increased life expectancy, not increased birth rate, and it will flatten out in a few decades.

High birth rates are a product of extreme poverty, where child mortality is a problem. It doesn't take a lot of wealth for a country to solve most of the basic child killers (sanitation and access to clean water, vaccination, and most importantly, mothers who can read). And the extreme poverty rate is plummeting - from 29% in the 1990s to just 9% today.

Fertility treatments are a luxury, something that only the wealthiest tenth or so of the world can even afford. It's for people who are struggling to have one child, not trying to get their fifth.

bobmarley1• 8 years ago

Malthusian overpopulation stopped being a serious scientific theory years ago.

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_...

akshayB• 8 years ago

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.

duxup2• 8 years ago

It's unfortunate, because I loved having my wife at home, and hell I'd be happy to stay home.... but it's just financially too risky IMO.

The big catch is insurance in the US... and that really pisses me off that it such a big deal. Also FMLA is kinda wonky in the us. I worked for a company based in CA... CA employees got paid on FMLA, I (being outside of CA) did not :P

ng12• 8 years ago

Same. It's sad to me that my kid won't have the same experience growing up that I did.

exotree• 8 years ago

Recently married and thinking about kids soon. One of use would love to stay home. However, the risk of putting all earning power in one person seems too great, and neither of us have a deep interest in paying for childcare. So no kids for now.

madengr2• 8 years ago

Link to the Idiocracy intro:

https://youtu.be/CXSz0bA9CiE

The risk of job loss in this economy is a lot lower than several years ago, so now may be the time to do it. Once a kid is 3, then they can go to preschool, and that cost is lower than individualized care, and goes down with age.

It’s also not going to get easier if you wait, as complications increase with age, even in early 30’s. My wife was on bed rest for 12 weeks, 10 of those in the hospital. A total of $140k, so better damn well have insurance, and I needed to use FMLA too.

Also, 48% of pregnancies are paid for by Medicare. Plenty of illegal immigrants having border babies, which you are paying for, from birth through college.

fein3• 8 years ago

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.

arandr0x4• 8 years ago

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.

cimmanom3• 8 years ago

But one that many women in the mid-century had to resort to Valium to endure, and not one that anyone should be forced or pressured into.

ivl• 8 years ago

I'm not going to address the social aspect of this as that's not really my concern.

This is a clear case of the lump of labour fallacy. It's a zero sum way of looking at the economy that has almost no backing. The same thing is said of immigrants, and the same logic applied to trade.

There's nothing to suggest that women joining the workforce suppressed wages. The issue you're facing is that you're looking at the economy as a fixed size. It's not. Increasing the number of wage earners grows the economy. In fact, research(1) suggests that for each 10% of women joining the workforce, wages raised 5%. You've managed to ignore the increase in spending that comes with more earners, with less time to do things at home.

1. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jors.12336

Domenic_S3• 8 years ago

Could you elaborate on what about the collapse showed that?

lainga2• 8 years ago

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, ...)

angersock• 8 years ago

Baby belt?

Domenic_S3• 8 years ago

I see a map for married women, and one for college educated women, but not one for both. Which one are you looking at?

lainga2• 8 years ago

You're right, I thought it was by 2 categories. It's just for married women.

danielvf4• 8 years ago

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

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.

brailsafe• 8 years ago

The opposite is true and I'm glad race is not part of it. These maps are visualising information about aspects of life and we can see where patterns emerge so we can ask questions. This is opposed to starting with perceptually legitimate categorical ways seperating people and working inwards, which isn't usually useful. "We need more discrimination" isn't a sentiment I can get behind.

justin662• 8 years ago

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.

You'd immediately have to double the number of graphics and do god knows what to the amount of text, and that's if you just did a very simplified racial breakdown. Better to leave an ethnic, racial, or religious breakdown (and they're all worth discussing) for a follow-up article.

bilbo0s4• 8 years ago

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?

Retric• 8 years ago

Poverty is a much stronger link: http://www.censusscope.org/us/map_poverty.html

Look at the blob in Arizona for example on Without a college degree vs poverty. So yes the south east black population clusters in similar areas as poverty but out west they look rather different.

cimmanom3• 8 years ago

That looks like Appalachia plus a swath of the Deep South. It's a region with particularly deep poverty and challenges around education and health care.

teeray• 8 years ago

That's the shoreline of a prehistoric ocean:

http://www.deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-election...

fertilityrspctr3• 8 years ago

I see at least three distinct populations here. First are the Mormons of Utah, south Idaho, and adjacent areas, which you missed.

The big one is the Bible Belt minus the Black Belt, and also seems to be missing the Carolinas, maybe because they've had so much internal migration from the Northeast recently.

El Paso and surrounding area is surely associated more with the Rio Grande Valley of far south Texas than either of these two areas -- a culturally distinct area of Tejanos and more recent Hispanic immigrants.

I don't know what to attribute the area of lower-age married fertility in eastern CO + western KS to, or other scattered areas.

throwawayjava• 8 years ago

I don't know what to attribute the area of lower-age married fertility in eastern CO + western KS to, or other scattered areas.

I would lump in KS/eastern CO with OK and with Missouri minus KC/STL/JC.

So three or four regions:

* The bible belt - the black belt

* Mormons

* The lower midwest and "eastern west" (e.g., eastern CO but also maybe even to some extent parts of NV, the Dakotas, and the rural eastern partns of the PNW). Maybe this is two groups that sort of blend at their boundaries?

No two places are exactly the same but that last grouping makes at least as much sense as the bible belt. IMO, at least.

I'm not a demographer or anything, but I bet that you could explain some of the cultural differences between the bible belt and the lower midwest+eastern west in terms of historically dominant congregations/denominations of Christianity. (And also some other things, most notably slavery.)

spitfire• 8 years ago

Isn't that the bible belt?

LyndsySimon2• 8 years ago

I don't know of a name for it off the top of my head, but it corresponds very closely with the migration flow of Scot, Irish, and German settlers from the late 18th Century through the early 20th Century.

My ancestors (and my wife's) all arrived in Virginia. Over the course of several generations they gradually moved West - first into the Shenandoah Valley, then down through SW VA and into Kentucky and Tennessee. They arrived in Northern Arkansas from 1840 or so through 1900.

This a common enough story that it's listed as a migratory group by Ancestry.com. It seems likely that what you're seeing here is a social norm among a discrete population with a mostly shared culture.

jessaustin3• 8 years ago

Colin Woodard calls it the "Greater Appalachia nation-state". David Hackett Fischer calls it the "Borderlands folkway". I think I prefer Fischer's book, possibly because my father devoured that particular section and is still quite enthusiastic about it.

beat10• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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.

beat10• 8 years ago

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

emodendroket3• 8 years ago

I'll get back to you with my decision about whether to read an entire book to make heads or tails of your obscure comment.

DoreenMichele8• 8 years ago

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.

wgerard• 8 years ago

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.

I'm actually surprised this isn't a thing already - my university certainly allowed part-time students who could still work towards a degree.

That being said, I think financial aid was also tied into being a full-time student so I immediately see the drawbacks of that.

DoreenMichele8• 8 years ago

Some financial aid is available for taking 2 classes, which is defined as part-time. And we could create financial aid specifically for a mommy track.

A bigger issue in my mind is the relatively high cost of classes. In places with low college costs for 2 year colleges, the tuition is potentially payable out of pocket.

It would be possible to design systems where we give more welfare benefits if you attend college. As education goes up, women have fewer kids.

I think encouraging welfare moms to get an education would help deter them from having large families, which is one if the things that compounds their problems and keeps them stuck in poverty.

I originally wanted three kids. I ultimately opted to stop at two. The fact that I am educated is likely a factor in that decision.

pc865• 8 years ago

It is a thing already, it's called going to school part-time.

whorleater2• 8 years ago

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.

pc865• 8 years ago

There is no "serious risk" with pregnancy until at least 40 or older unless there are unrelated health issues. There is a small increase in risk and decrease in fertility through the mid 30's but 35 is an extremely young age to consider risky.

DoreenMichele8• 8 years ago

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.

magic_beans5• 8 years ago

This is extremely harsh and your complete ignorance tells me you are not a woman.

Fertility in some women declines as early as 28. Most women do not talk publicly about how difficult it is to conceive, because people like you think they should have it easy at age 27-30. Guess what? It can get really hard as soon as you're in your late twenties.

danans7• 8 years ago

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.

Agreed 100% + add publicly backed financial support. IMO, moms study damn hard, and don't take stuff for granted.

This (mom in longer term educational program) is what well-off people with spouses in college/grad school do today with their own funds. Most universities are already happy to accommodate those people because they are paying. I know this from my own experience.

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.

Evil patriarchy is forcing women into such marriages, via repressive social norms and limits to educational and career opportunity for women, instead of allowing them to have their own choice. The choice can't be marriage vs social isolation and/or destitution.

There's nothing wrong with a marriage being partly about providing financial security to someone who doesn't have it, but to make it the only option for that person... that seems evil.

EDIT: wording

bilbo0s4• 8 years ago

Agreed 100% + add publicly backed financial support.

That's where you go off the rails.

A girl from an impoverished background, whose only fault is that she is not a mom, has far more need of "publicly backed financial support" of her education than an upper middle class mom. Publicly backed financial support should be either restricted based on need for everyone, or it should be unrestricted and given to everyone as a matter of course. But telling a girl that she has to have a child before she gets access to this particular pot of money sets up the same restrictive environment and lack of "choice" that you decry in the "evil patriarchy".

ralusek• 8 years ago

Limited educational and career opportunity for women? More women in America graduate from university than men. The split is now roughly 60% women.

Saying things like this, blindly, is not just incorrect, but actually damaging.

eeZah7Ux• 8 years ago

Waiting too long to have kids can involve problems for both mother and child

This is way exaggerated. In the context of the article we are not talking about having children at 50.

Fomite• 8 years ago

"we are not talking about having children at 50" which is also way exaggerated. 50 is a good decade+ into "advanced maternal age" as a risk factor.

dk1138• 8 years ago

Nothing about our current economy is helping this.

Education: University education is already pricing out many hopefuls. Part-time education is happening because students need to balance income from a job and school responsibilities. Unless we are going to do something drastic about educational costs, this remains a blocker. So I would restate, "The US desperately needs to address education costs."

Historically a "financially established husband" was made capable because wages and costs of living were not at odds as they are today. The modern push for contractor/gig work to avoid the high costs of employee benefits means that nobody in the family unit is going to be financially established, even working two jobs (or more). Adding a child and the necessary leave moves that family into an irrevocable financial situation. So I would rephrase: "Historically we resolved these conflicts with a living wage". The problem statement then is that the current economic environment and lacking protection of workplace security during and after pregnancy needs to be fixed.

Net-net, as a growing trend, we are on a path of reducing American citizens to business growth objects. Maximize recurring income (rent, not buy), reduce expenditures (lower wages, fewer/no benefits), reduce time to market (lower educational standards/on-line degrees/script-driven labor work with minimal training), increased business flexibility (use contracting companies to avoid responsibility of employee welfare and continuity).

There are many others, but if we treat humans as business and are short-sited, you arrive at this scenario--baby-making isn't good business.

Governments have the responsibility for long-term planning and national security, not corporations. I would absolutely argue that birthrates are a matter of national security (security in this case being the security of the dollar). If there isn’t governmental transformation to help with the above, this will only get worse.

mjevans2• 8 years ago

The cost of living near jobs rises because we've run out of the cheat that the Interstate highway system provided: access to 'reasonably' close areas without resource competition for living space.

Instead we're seeing rising costs of living without substantively rising earnings squeeze the general population as rent seeking and logical (but probably not actual) collusion result in the non-property-owning classes being turned in to modern day serfs who rent everything and have no place they 'own'.

dragonwriter10• 8 years ago

Waiting too long to have kids can involve problems for both mother and child.

While this is undeniably true, deferring childbirth the length of a traditional full-time undergraduate program immediately following high-school doesn't get you anywhere close to the age where that's an issue, so that concern isn't a good argument for a part-time “mommy track”. Conversely, part-time education for re-entering students is already a thing, though not necessarily well-supported by top-tier institutions. (Unfortunately, recently it's also one of the major focus of private for-profit predatory scam institutions, and federal efforts to fight that problem have been parked back under the current administration, so there are problems to address.)

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.

No, women choosing for themselves to resolve the balance of concerns that way is not, even by most people who decry the existence of “evil patriarchy”, described as an example of that problem. Women being externally compelled to do so without meaningful options—sometimes at ages where meaningful consent would be unlikely even if the girl had a choice—as has been true in many historical conditions and sometimes true in some places today may be, but that's because of the lack of women's (or girls') agency in the decision, not the outcome.

danans7• 8 years ago

Conversely, part-time education for re-entering students is already a thing, though not necessarily well-supported by top-tier institutions.

It is an option if you can pay for it yourself. It's just not an option for poorer people, who probably need it the most.

DoreenMichele8• 8 years ago

While this is undeniably true, deferring childbirth the length of a traditional full-time undergraduate program immediately following high-school

Unfortunately, that's not how this works. If it were, then the article wouldn't be citing early 30s as the age at which educated women have kids.

How this works is that a poor woman from a bad neighborhood in her teens is happy if the guy doesn't beat her, isn't a substance abuser and has a job at all. Then she gets an education and her expectations change. Of course, he won't be a substance abuse. Of course, he won't beat her. He also should have a professional job, dress well, and have certain other appealing traits. Her expectations go way, way up.

In most cases, she also is unwilling to give up her career. She didn't get a degree to become a homemaker. Two career couples face significant challenges in finding a city where both careers can thrive.

Things get vastly more complicated and it takes time to find the right guy, among other things. Some of these women start trying to arrange for a child in their twenties and don't get one until their late thirties or even their forties.

Julie Numar was quoted as saying she sometimes wished she was brave enough to have an accident. She married a Texas businessman and had her only child in her forties. She was soon divorced and raised the child alone.

There are good things about getting an education and career as a woman. But for most women, it complicates the hell out of the desire to have kids. Those complications can mean it gets put off and put off and put off.

But I think I'm going to walk away from this discussion for now. It's an overwhelmingly male forum. The issues involved in waiting to have kids that so many women find agonizing are being trivialized. I'm being attacked and dismissed. The basis for my knowledge is being attacked as irrelevant. Etc.

Y'all have fun as men hashing out how women ought to view this issue.

benatkin3• 8 years ago

If the tuition money is there, the colleges desperately need the enrollment. Could be a great idea.

Nasrudith• 8 years ago

Reminds me of a mostly science fiction concept that would technically help but probably wouldn't be too culturally accepted for varying reasons: creches and professional parent teachers. Essentially extending teaching to the point of having the "unfun" parts taken care of and educational involvement early on while still allowing the biological parents to play the fun uncle/aunt role. With dual career with kids households that already has a predecessor in daycare and babysitters spending more time with their children.

There are some fringe bonuses as well, people who are useful or have other good traits may not be the best for actually raising children. In a hypothetical basic income for most without an unautomatable skill that could produce another job pool.

It has some degree of precedent in the past with the elite having nannys handle most of the childrearing. That also lead to the less bizzare in context Oedipus Complex aspect of Freud. With upper middle class and downward lifestyles the common reaction is "How messed up do you have to be to come up with that conclusion?". But with a combination of genetic sexual attraction and lack of Westermarck effect it makes more sense.

That said while it may work on a technical labor and societal utility level there are many social obstacles and exploitable flaws. One of which is that parents tend to want to be involved with their child(ren)'s li(fe/ves).

Another is control and paying for it - personal attention is needed for best results compared to just enmasse orphanage style. Government provided is exploitable for shaping society in selfish ways. Large corporate providers would suffer from essentially the same issues but slightly different ways of seeking power.

Then there are questions of what sort of control should be allowable vs "the experts" which would be far more contentious than CPS. Private with most control requires income inequality by definition for small "class size" and would fail to provide it enmasse. Plus the competing curve between quality by exclusivity and quality by class size.

And finally there is the human element of emotional bonding, pride in few being willing to admit their child would be best off cared for by others, cultural transmission being valued, and the fact that frankly said positions would be a child molestor's dream beyond typical access to children jobs.

klenwell• 8 years ago

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...

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• 8 years ago

These may explain the range but the not really the gap.

sunseb2• 8 years ago

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.)

frockington3• 8 years ago

It's not a zero sum gain economically. The amount of wealth in the world is constantly increasing

Denzel3• 8 years ago

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.

sunseb2• 8 years ago

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...

What could go wrong ?

xd1011• 8 years ago

Real estate definitely is a zero sum game, unless you create new libertarian island platforms floating in the ocean.

Good education is a zero sum game (free places at ivy league for example).

Health care has waiting lists in some countries.

The whole idea that the "pie gets bigger" because even homeless people can now have cheap electronic gadgets is deeply flawed, but perhaps it is in the interest of some people to create the illusion of progress.

benatkin3• 8 years ago

The amount of carbon and methane being released into the air, resources being gobbled up, deforestation, and pollution, is already too much. That's why it's a zero sum game, in order to get the things everyone wants, you have to out-earn, guilt, or legislate away somebody else's. It might not exactly match the concept, but it's close enough, much like the old free speech in privately owned public spaces debate.

dzdt• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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.

jsonne• 8 years ago

I like most of what you're saying, however, I would propose this. For kids, at a certain point, more interaction becomes detrimental. As an impending father, who will likely be the primary caretaker, I want them to spend a significant portion of time without my help so they learn and grow and can problem solve from an early age. Obviously not abandoning them or something so extreme, but letting them be creative and become their own person. As an aside, I think this all in parenting attitude some people, not saying you necessarily, have is what pushes people to have children later (if at all).

defen• 8 years ago

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...

jawns• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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.

watwut2• 8 years ago

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.

gowld2• 8 years ago

Assortative mating exacerbates economic inequality, as the rich marry the rich, and the genetic consequences of assortative mating is a major hypothesis for the increase in autism diagnosis rate.

taysic2• 8 years ago

To be a nurse or secretary in those days were almost equivalent to a female executive today - simply because there were almost no female executives then.

aj7• 8 years ago

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

dragonwriter10• 8 years ago

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.

someguydave• 8 years ago

Dual-income households in expensive cost-of-living areas.

DanielleMolloy2• 8 years ago

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.

MichaelMoser1232• 8 years ago

Incidentally the GDR also had an extremely high divorce rate. I never saw an adequate explanation of the reasons for this. http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/133p/133...

DanielleMolloy2• 8 years ago

This can be attributed to people who work themselves being independent from a potentially abusive person's income; and to widely spread atheism, much more than in most European states (currently still 50% atheists (approximately, depending on the survey)).

arandr0x4• 8 years ago

France, which is one of the countries in Europe where the birthrate is least endangered, also makes this easy by having widely available childcare and childcare subsidies, full-day school starting age 3 and reduced work hours for everyone, not just parents. (This is despite France being generally sexist and children being largely the responsibility of mothers until very recently.)

This is not a panacea, and average age of mothers is also quite high due to a high proportion of people going for graduate degrees. However, it shows that a family with 2, 3 children can still be thought of as desirable and attainable by educated parents in a 1st world country, with the right environment.

T2_t2• 8 years ago

Has that continued post reunification? A big problem with interventions like this is that they are so specific to the zeitgeist. By that I mean when everyone struggles, gender differences diminish, and when everyone is doing well, or at least so it seems, gender differences exaggerate.

To be less controversial, the number of artists in ancient Greece was small. Today, depending upon definition, a huge portion of people make a living creatively. Heck, even a job like Food Photographer is an historical outlier in terms of the skill set.

As more types of jobs open up, and society has much, much better individual food security, people make decisions to enter more and more niche professions that don't always make for great statistics.

That's part of the modern, western problem, that when people are free to do what they want, and what we individually want is complicated, they tend to choose paths that lead to an aggregate we didn't expect. I mean, honestly, how many people ever predicted Instagram models in the 1980s? Youtube stars are analogous to TV stars, but Instagram? You take a photo of yourself next to something? That's your job?

Arete314152• 8 years ago

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.

nojvek2• 8 years ago

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?

The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America

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