Headline The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America
First-time mothers are older in big cities and on the coasts, and younger in rural areas and in the Great Plains and the South. In New York and San Francisco, their average age is 31 and 32. In Todd County, S.D., and Zapata County, Tex., it’s half a generation earlier, at 20 and 21, according to the analysis, which was of all birth certificates in the United States since 1985 and nearly all for the five years prior…
The difference in when women start families cuts along many of the same lines that divide the country in other ways, and the biggest one is education. Women with college degrees have children an average of seven years later than those without — and often use the years in between to finish school and build their careers and incomes.
People with a higher socioeconomic status “just have more potential things they could do instead of being a parent, like going to college or grad school and having a fulfilling career,” said Heather Rackin, a sociologist at Louisiana State University who studies fertility. “Lower-socioeconomic-status people might not have as many opportunity costs — and motherhood has these benefits of emotional fulfillment, status in their community and a path to becoming an adult.”
Here is it in pictures. Age of first birth in 1980:
Age of first birth in 2016:
The scooping out of data of women in their 20s is caused by education. Not education, of course, but the encampment at degree-producing centers.
At least with a degree you have earned the privilege to sit in a soul-sucking cubicle and devote your life to creating meaningless PowerPoint “decks.”
So, what we have here is a correlation between over-educating (or at least credentializing) young women and dis-civilizational behavior.
It’s almost as if our ancestors knew a thing or two about human behavior, and shaped society accordingly.
I hate to think how many dead in the womb that scoop represents.
Proof — if you ignore changes in longevity, health, demographics, technology, information, communication, etc.
But it’s never ceteris paribus…
Anecdotally
My mother (Midwest/Rural) had her first at 31 back in 1950 (dad was 39)
I don’t suppose anyone is tracking fathers’ ages – however, if there is useful information about that, it might be significant. There seems to be pretty good indications that as fathers’ ages increase, the rate of the child’s mutations rises fairly significantly.
What education? All the teachers belong to the NEA which stands for the No Education Association.
Do we have same kind of census with males? I mean, first time fathers’ age. It would be quite interesting to see the differences.