Census Data Reveals a Shift in Patterns of Childbearing

 

In 2000, the portion of women with college degrees between the ages of 25 and 34 who had children was 42 percent, according to the data. Ten years later, the same group of women, now ages 35 to 44 — representing about three million Americans — were far more likely to be mothers: About 76 percent had children, according to the data.

In contrast, women who did not finish high school were more likely to have children earlier. In 2000, about 83 percent of women ages 25 to 34 who did not have a high school diploma had children. The percentage rose to 88 percent by 2010.

The trend of educated women having children later accelerated in the 1980s, along with the rise in women’s educational attainment, said Andrew J. Cherlin, a demographer at Johns Hopkins University.

“College-educated women are following a different path to having children,” Mr. Cherlin said. “They wait until they’ve graduated from college, gotten married and started a career, before having a child.”

Childbearing and fertility patterns have changed greatly since the 1970s.

There are far more women in their 40s without children now than there were in past decades. In 1976, just 10 percent of all women ages 40 to 44 had no children. That percentage had jumped to 19 percent by 2010.

White women in their 40s were more likely to be childless than Hispanics. Just 12 percent of Hispanic women from 40 to 44 were childless, compared with 20 percent of whites, 17 percent of blacks and 16 percent of Asians.

In 1976, the earliest year in Monday’s data release, more women had three children than had two, but that has shifted over the years, with far more women having two children than three.

And it is more likely for a woman who has never married to have a child now than it was in the 1970s. Just 3 percent of women who had never been married had a child in 1976. Now the number is about 21 percent, up sharply even from 2008, when it was 15 percent.

About 55 percent of women who had a child in the last year were in the job market, according to the data: about 34 percent were working full time, 14 percent were working part time, and 7 percent were unemployed.