Reasons why highly educated women have fewer children than desired
The number of children that men and women have by the end of their reproductive years in the USA deviates in certain groups from the desire to have children at a young age. In her current study, research scientist Natalie Nitsche examines two important social factors, the timing of first marriage and the connection between the desire for children and educational attainment.
How are the desire for children at a young age, the level of education, the timing of first marriage and the actual number of children of one's own by age 43 related for men and women in the USA? Natalie Nitsche, research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, and a colleague investigated this complex interaction and published the study in the journal Demography.
The researchers discovered two crucial connections. First, well-educated women with the desire to have at least three children at a young age are less likely to become mothers at all than less educated women who wanted at least three children. Second, the timing of the first marriage influences the number of children for both men and women, and whether they become parents at all.
Well educated women are more likely to remain childless
For their study, the researchers evaluated data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. In this representative longitudinal survey, several thousand Americans born between 1957 and 1964 regularly reported, among other things, on their desire to have children, their educational attainment and their labor market experience. In the analyses, the researchers used data from more than 5,000 respondents and divided them into four different groups according to the highest level of education. They also divided the same respondents into three groups according to their desire to have children at a young age depending on whether they stated when they were between 14 and 18 either no children/one child, two children ,or at least three children,.
Comparing the groups, the researchers discovered that among women who at a young age wanted to have a least three children, the likelihood to remine childless is highest for women with at least a Bachelor's degree. They are therefore more likely to have no children than women with the same level of education who wanted two children or women with lower levels of education who wanted just as many children at a young age.
Middle-aged parents: Social norms seem more important than biological factors
However, when well-educated women with a great desire to have children become mothers at a young age, they have the most children in the study comparison. "These women may be less inclined to do things halfway. They seem to decide either to have an extended family or to not have children at all," says Nitsche.
Whether you are a man or a woman, people who marry for the first time or are in a steady partnership for the first time after age 30 are significantly less likely become a parent at all. "It seems that biological factors play a smaller role than societal influences," says Nitsche. Even though men can have children longer than women, men still do not become parents much more often than women when the first stable partnership occurs after the age of 35, at least in the American birth cohort studied. "We have thus discovered two of the decisive factors that explain why Americans in certain cases end up having fewer children than they desired to have in early life," says Natalie Nitsche. Whether these findings also apply to European countries or to men and women born after 1965 remains to be seen in further studies.
