the number of children, (and the number of childless couples/women, I assume) has been growing over time. Most western countries are in a demographic downturn, single-child families are more normal and three children is much rarer than decades ago. Only immigration prevents a greater collapse, as is already happening in Japan and Russia - and soon, China.
So if you freeze stats that include women in their 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, you’ll be biased toward a much earlier demographic’s results. There are plenty of women I know (dueling anecdotes here) who are pushing 40’s and have no intention of having children. Yes, they haven’t reached the point of no return yet, but soon.
It’s a financial issue. When you have almost nothing, children only cost the extra food and provide some security for your old age. When day care, fancy strollers and car seats, iPods and XBoxes figure into the mix, when a mortgage requires two incomes, when children limit your ability to travel or buy that big screen TV etc. - not to mention university tuition, health insurance, and any other number of expenses - economic logic suggests that one is enough if you possess the urge to make little copies of yourself.
The two numbers are measuring different things. The 82% is women who end their reproductive years having borne at least one child. The 52.4% is all women of reproductive age who have borne a child. So the second figure includes 15-year-olds, who are obviously a lot less likely than 45-year-olds to have had a baby.
Some women have never borne a child, but are still mothers, because they’ve adopted. If I had to guess, I’d say that more women who are unable to have children adopt, and therefore still become mothers, than women who have given up one (or more) children for adoption never have one that they keep and raise. In other words, the birth/adoption scale favors more women becoming mothers.
Anyway, just tallying up women you know will end up skewed in favor of more mothers, because you may not know that a woman has adopted.
I’m married to an excellent father. My son is very, very lucky. However, I will say that the “good father” bar is lower than the “good mother” bar. He really does do almost as much work as I do (and I don’t work at a paid job full-time, so I should spend more time with the boychik), but at any rate, he could do half the job I do (in terms of time, and in terms of how well he does it), and still be a great father, while if I did that, I’d just be an adequate mother.
how exactly do these fathers expect to shoulder any part of the pregnancy/childbirth/breast feeding part of raising children? They can’t.
I only have a limited sample to draw on, but most men who think they are shouldering half of the rest of the burden of raising children seem to be delusional. The mother does 80 to 90% of the work.
I know some now-single women who report they have less work to do with the father out of the picture because they don’t have to clean up after/feed the father in addition to the child.
How many men do you know who took “family leave” after the birth of a child so the mother could go back to work? I don’t know any.
In Jewish families, it’s typical for the grandparents to help out a lot. My mother paid out bills for two months, so my husband took two full weeks off, and then six weeks at part time, when I was at my most exhausted (I had a 27 hour labor followed by an emergency c-section under general anesthesia). My aunt was also present in town, and I could go over to her house during the day after DH was back at work.
I did have to teach my husband a lot about caring for a baby, but he picked it up fast. Once our son was eating some food, and didn’t absolutely have to be nursed, it got much easier.
One morning, when the baby was five months old, I woke up totally on my own to find a bathed and dressed baby, having been fed some cereal and bananas by his father, and given a little watered down apple juice, contentedly having his tummy time on the floor, with the dog helping. His clothes didn’t match, but I said not one word, other than how clean and happy he looked, and took several pictures. He was dressed appropriately for the weather, and I can’t ask for more than that.
And see this is where modern demographics and economics are changing. Here in Canada, Unemployment Insurance allows either parent a total of 52 weeks parental leave (17 for the mother for the birth, and 35 to be split however they choose). However, it only pays 55% of the first $40,000 or so - basically, peanuts for a decent wage earner. The couple I knew, the wife made substantially more than the husband, they could not afford for her to be off work for a year. She was back in two months, and hubby took the rest of the available time. She could not afford to go from $75,000 to $20,000/year for any length of time.
Basic economics - the modern lifestyle with a myriad of time payments to keep up the lifestyle, the interruption of a birth (let alone several) will seriously affect the financial well-being of a couple where both work. This is just a continuation of the basic demographic fact, that as society gets richer, the birth rate falls dramatically.