I once read a study of married middle-class teenage moms (Mormons) and it found that both mothers and babies do better if the mother is a tad older. The young mothers had lower-birth-weight babies and a higher risk of complications. The authors of the study concluded that their growing bodies competed for nutrients with their fetuses.
I don’t remember the exact age of “teenage” for this study. I thought it was under 20, but it might have been under 18.
But i agree with your broader point, that it’s easiest to have kids if you start younger, and 22-25 is probably the ideal age (not the ideal age for first babies, but all for babies) from a purely physical point of view.
I wasn’t trying to say that a minor change in attitudes could have as big an effect as a large difference in culture, but that in general cultural attitudes to children make a bigger difference than government financial support.
Those are a very small percentage of all women with at least weekly religious attendance, no? The majority in this group may be evangelicals, but don’t belong to any cultish sect. What kind of messages are average evangelicals getting on procreation?
I recall having read a critique of a similar stat before, I think this was it:
I’m not sure how much of what he says applies to the stat you cited. But I don’t think the U-shaped curve is going to be much help, because it would be relative rather than absolute income that boosts fertility: hiring help requires other people to have low incomes as much as having a high income oneself.
However, there’s a lot more that’s relevant to the thread in the essay, so it’s well worth reading. His conclusion:
Yes, and it’s especially sad when people who definitely want kids can’t have them because they were trying to be responsible and do the right thing.
Reducing time spent in education is the most obvious way to shorten this time frame, which is why I’ve been suggesting it. Making more housing available would also help, ie support YIMBY reforms. And/or change the cultural expectation of owning your own home. Changing the job market is a lot harder.
Very sensible. Anyone can have fertility problems, so it’s foolish to purposely wait much longer than this (obviously some people haven’t found a partner yet, or change their mind later like me, in which case better fertility assistance would help).
I do think it’s overrated how good contraception needs to be for married couples. It varies by individual, but for many having an extra child would be closer to a happy accident than a disaster, and it would be an easy way to raise birth rates a little. Yet my experience was that doctors and hospitals are very keen to push contraception.
I think we actually have done this to an extent, and it’s very bad for them and for society. It’s a myth that our brains mature at 25, anyway. They keep changing through the 20s and even into the 30s; there’s no magic moment when a person is fully mature.
So we should continue to demonize men who walk away from fatherhood, require them to pay child support, while stigmating the mother and throwing random obstacles that make it hard to actuality collect support from both the fathers and the state? Meanwhile short we keep acting like women who walk away from motherhood are such a gross violation of the natural order they can’t be considered women (or just pretend it never happens? Isn’t encouraging someone to have children if they don’t feel that they’re ready is just as much “treating them like children” as discouraging them until you feel that they’re ready?
Yeah, sure - probably 2 kids in the 25-30 age range. Then the fertility drop starts at 30. If she wants kid #3 she needs to get right on that. Nothing like 3 kids under 6 to take care of.
If a woman started her family at 20 she could space those kids out more if she thinks it’s a good idea, and if she wanted more than 3 she’d be more likely to do so.
Our social expectations do not align well with biological facts.
Then you weren’t making a particularly relevant response to my specific objection in post #812. Okay, no harm, no foul.
We can agree that a more rigidly traditionalist culture where procreation is presented as a universal desideratum, and nonprocreation is looked down on as shameful or pitiable, is likely to have higher birthrates than a more laissez-faire culture in which government tries to incentivize higher birthrates with modest financial benefits. Yup.
My point, however, was that given that a more laissez-faire culture is what we’re in, and that it’s unlikely and undesirable (from the viewpoint of most people in developed nations) that we’re going to revert to being a rigidly traditionalist culture, then the structural-support issues are most likely a lot more salient when it comes to fertility trends than the minor sorts of social-attitude tweaking that you proposed.
This is still a completely unsupported and implausible claim. There is AFAICT no reason to expect that the current tendency among many non-wealthy American women to delay childbearing until well into their 30s or even 40s, in a game of “fertility chicken” attempting to cope with the crippling financial and logistical demands of childbearing in this culture, would be counteracted by decreasing their typical age of finishing formal education from early twenties to late teens.
Unless what you’re advocating is simply something along the lines of “many college-educated women who want to combine professional careers with realistically feasible parenting commitments in middle-class lifestyles, and thus often have to delay childbearing for a decade or more to attain enough financial and familial stability to do so, should instead pursue working-class career paths, with less formal education, less household financial assets, and more opportunities for increased fertility.”
I mean, if that’s what any individual woman wants to do with her personal and working life, I’m all for it. And I think there need to be a lot more structural supports to make working-class jobs provide more reliable funding for secure lives and families. But I wouldn’t describe the core issue there as “reducing the time spent in education”. (Especially since trades-career apprenticeships often take 2-5 years, or as long as many people spend getting college degrees.)
Now, if the issue is to avoid burdensome college debt by avoiding college, as I said, then that’s a structural-support issue that needs to be addressed in its own right. But it’s absurd to suggest that finishing education at 18 rather than 23 would somehow by itself significantly shorten the far longer “fertility chicken” delay of deferring motherhood for over a decade.
Especially when you consider that earning potential tends to be significantly lower for women with only a high-school education, thus making it harder to attain a financially stable position for motherhood (again, leaving aside the question of college debt).
In other words, a structural-support issue (again). Yes, I agree.
My 35 year old friends struggling to have kids actually used that education, though. I didn’t think that’s realistic for many. I think making it less costly to have kids before your career is established might be more practical. Because, right now, it’s really damn hard to established yourself professionally if your take time off to have kids.
I don’t know if that’s as true for people whose profession is “hairdresser” rather than “computer scientist”. Perhaps those people would be better served by spending less time in school. But it does kind of trap you into a low-education job path.
This… is interesting, I guess? You seem to be suggesting that we as a society should be encouraging, if not absolutely unwanted pregnancies, at least more initially-unwanted or not-much-wanted pregnancies?
And that this increase in initially-unwanted pregnancies among married couples should be at least tacitly encouraged by doctors and hospitals?! As in, “Well, you currently think you don’t want another pregnancy at present, but you probably would be okay with it once it actually happened, so why not be a little less meticulous about your contraceptive practices? Take a chance now and then, what’s the worst that can happen?”
Um, no. Since you bring it up, I do not think the OB-GYN medical establishment should be trying to nudge its patients into increasing their chances of unintended conception.
Not even if they’re doing it out of a patriotic concern for national fertility levels. Not even if they’re (rather paternalistically) limiting this promotion of less-effective contraception practices only to married patients.
Now, i do think that some married could are less cautious about birth control because it doesn’t matter as much. Charitably, that explains my parents. But other people trying to take that choice away from married women? That’s evil. I assume that DemonTree merely meant that doctors could present options, with commentary that “if you are less worried about how well your method of birth control works…”
But really, the only method that’s substantially less reliable is timing, and that is a horrible method for a lot of other reasons, like that it prevents women from having sex when they are most likely to want sex. It’s a very patriarchal method, IMHO.
Yeah, if the intended point is just that we as a society in general shouldn’t shame or scold couples for ending up with an “oopsie” pregnancy that they decide they want to continue, well, sure, absolutely.
But IMHO nobody who didn’t actually give birth to you has any business offering you any unsolicited suggestions or coaxing about increasing your willingness to tolerate an unintended pregnancy. (Even for mothers, it’s skating on thin ice, if you ask me.)
And certainly nobody within hollering distance of a white lab coat should be giving such an idea even the remotest consideration. How about you mind your own business, Doctor?!?
On the other hand for decades I’ve consistently heard from women complaints about how doctors do everything they can to discourage or outright block contraception.
We know from Scandinavian countries that generous maternity leave, free childcare, and free college aka no college debt do not make much difference to birth rates, or persuade women to have kids any earlier. Probably because, at least for middle class people, it would still be seen as irresponsible and low status to have kids before reaching these milestones of being established in career and home, and because for women it would still interfere with professional development: not only in using maternity leave to take months or a year off to care for the baby (and then likely doing it again in two or three years’ time) but for many years afterwards, because kids are a major commitment that competes with a career for time and attention, and prevents prioritising it.
It depends on the education and on the profession. The things learned in a computer science degree may be directly relevant to a career, but the average college degree is not directly useful. I’ve used very little of what I learned in mine, and that’s going to be even more true for non-STEM degrees. I’m not saying no people need to go to college, but a major part of the reason so many do is that it functions as gatekeeping for the better jobs, and this isn’t actually necessary.
A better objection. What else contributes to delaying parenthood, that we could change as a society?
This is the underlying issue. Maybe we do need to completely reorder society so young people can have kids straight after school with government support, work for a few years, then do education and a career later, if that’s what they want. The downside is that relationships formed so early would be likely to break up as the couple grew and changed.
Or have universal egg and sperm freezing, and free IVF for all so people can have healthy kids later when it fits their career plans. But that’s onerous, and people are increasingly less able to be active parents as they age - not to mention the chance the kids will be orphaned at a comparatively young age.
Which circles back to the conclusion reached many many many posts ago - there is no practical way to do that.
We can avoid the complete fall off the cliff that countries like South Korea and Japan have experienced by have societal expectations of parenting more equally distributed and not having regressive role expectations that are incompatible with two career households.
Flex hours and work at home can help with that. Subsidized childcare can help. Revisiting our model of advanced education to avoid crippling debt can help (along with more value based on apprenticeship style paths).
We can encourage corporate cultures that value family balance and support it. (Without stigmatizing those who choose other paths)
But none will change society or change the fact that taking off time has career path consequences. The gap needs to be filled in … some … other way. Or ways.
Since no one ever reads links, here’s what the one I posted yesterday has to say about education (yes, it’s a Medium essay, but the author is a researcher on fertility):
The relationship between education and fertility:
And it’s not just women’s education:
His explanation of the reasons:
Many of these are good changes and not something we’d want to reverse. And we don’t want to go back to having six children each anyway. But I really don’t see a justification for the UK government target of 50% of young people going on to higher education, given the negative effects on the dependency ratio and birth rate.
I like this take on it. As my kid is looking at college, it does occur to me that the college experience doesn’t really prepare you for adulting. Not that I have a solution for incorporating both extended education with supporting your own household, but our current system does perpetuate adolescence.
