Moms 40-Plus Are Outpacing Younger Parents in THIS Category, Says NYT
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By Salma Abdelnour Gilman
In case you missed it, this New York Times article about the declining rate of childbirth in the U.S. is fascinating for so many reasons. Here are just a few:
The only demographic in America with a rising childbirth rate nowadays is...women ages 40-44, says the NYT report. Survey participants in every other age group are having fewer babies than they thought they would. Here at Crunch Time Parents, one of the main reasons we exist is to explore—and celebrate—the fact that people have more options than ever before if they want to become parents later in life. But it's still a sobering surprise to see the childbirth rates plunging for every other age group.
So, why are Americans having fewer babies these days?
According to NYT, the #1 factor women cite for why they're delaying or avoiding having kids, or are having fewer babies than they originally wanted to, is that "child care is too expensive."
A quick look at the percentages: The article reports that of the adults who are having fewer kids than they expected to, "64 percent said it was because child care was too expensive, 43 percent said they waited too long because of financial instability and about 40 percent said it was because of a lack of paid family leave."
In fact, a full six out of the top eight factors that are keeping Americans from having kids revolve around financial reasons. The two other reasons are arguably tied to finances too: "Wanting more leisure time" and "wanting more time for the children I have."
Saner public policy, in line with what most other industrialized nations are doing, would at least fix the paid family leave problem, and make child care less unattainable for working parents. Incredibly, there's still no federal law in America that mandates employers to provide paid family leave—not even one single week—for new moms.
The U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world not to require employers to give paid family leave of any kind. A few states are instituting their own policies: New York, for instance, finally started a mandated paid family leave policy in 2018), but the overwhelming majority of states still don't.
Most other industrialized countries make child care more affordable for families, but in the U.S. those costs remain insanely high. How high? A Slate article headline "The Cost of Child Care in America Is Even More Outrageous Than You Thought." For anyone living in certain high-cost-of-living states, the average costs quoted in the Slate article are still lower than the reality.
Will the data on declining birth rates provide the policy incentive that's been apparently missing all these decades, even dating back to when President Nixon vetoed a universal child care plan because of its 'family-weakening implications,'" as Slate notes?
We won't hold our breath during this administration, but we're seeing a ray of light after this report, even if it's just pessoptimism.
BTW: Revealing as the New York Times article is, it depressingly makes the same move so many other publications do when it notes, "Female fertility begins significantly decreasing at age 32," and links to an American College of Obstetricians and Surgeons article that embeds a chart with fertility data from 17th century France. Yes, the 17th century.
Those age-32-is-the-cliff conclusions have since been debunked, as Jean Twenge pointed out in an influential piece on fertility data in The Atlantic. It's disappointing and frankly embarrassing that NYT and ACOG are still citing those charts.
We're long overdue for a fresh set of data, no?
Photo by kazuend via Unsplash.
