Abstract
The number of years women spend as mothers of young children likely has implications for women’s lifetime wages, earnings, and time use. Much prior research has pointed to widening education differences in a wide array of family patterns, but none has examined trends in the number of years women spend as mothers of young children. We use retrospective fertility data from the 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation to show how changes in women’s completed fertility and birth spacing produce trends in years women spend as mothers of children under age six from 1967 to 2017. Despite remarkably parallel declines in completed fertility, growing educational differences in birth spacing produced educational divergence in years spent as mothers of young children. Particularly striking is the finding that increases in birth spacing reversed declines in years spent as mothers for women with less than a high school degree such that they spent more years with young children in the 2010s than in the late 1960s. The increasing prevalence of multiple partner fertility explains some but not all of these trends.
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Notes
- 1.
Equation 10.1 holds at the individual-level, but we evaluate the function using average values of completed fertility and birth spacing. Given that the equation is non-linear, the average of the function is not necessarily equal to the function evaluated at the averages. Sensitivity tests show that trends and patterns estimated at the individual level are quite similar to those estimated using Eq. 10.1 evaluated at the averages although estimates at the individual level are somewhat lower (by about half a year). We estimate the function evaluated at the average because it allows for the decomposition of trends and differences into parts due to completed fertility and birth spacing.
- 2.
Syntax files for all analyses can be found on the first author’s website.
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Acknowledgments
This research was carried out using the facilities of the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (P2CHD047873). It was supported by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
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Appendix Table 1 Selected Trends and Distributions
Appendix Table 1 Selected Trends and Distributions
1967–1969 | 2010–2017 | |
|---|---|---|
Percentage distribution (%) | ||
Less than high school | 25.59 | 9.75 |
High school | 41.40 | 22.24 |
Some college | 18.23 | 27.78 |
College or more | 14.79 | 40.22 |
Completed fertility (All women) | ||
Women with MPF | ||
Less than high school | 5.26 | 3.66 |
High school | 4.04 | 3.19 |
Some college | 4.30 | 3.12 |
College or more | 3.00 | 2.88 |
Women without MPF | ||
Less than high school | 3.55 | 2.82 |
High school | 3.00 | 2.27 |
Some college | 3.22 | 2.04 |
College or more | 2.61 | 2.09 |
Birth spacing (years between births) | ||
Women with MPF | ||
Less than high school | 3.21 | 4.38 |
High school | 3.84 | 5.12 |
Some college | 3.45 | 5.63 |
College or more | 6.21 | 5.87 |
Women without MPF | ||
Less than high school | 3.43 | 4.29 |
High school | 3.74 | 4.03 |
Some college | 3.52 | 3.75 |
College or more | 3.07 | 3.42 |
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Schwartz, C.R., Doren, C., Li, A. (2020). Trends in Years Spent as Mothers of Young Children: The Role of Completed Fertility, Birth Spacing, and Multiple Partner Fertility. In: Schoen, R. (eds) Analyzing Contemporary Fertility. The Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis, vol 51. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48519-1_10
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