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Marriage (Still) Matters: The Contribution of Demographic Change to Trends in Childlessness in the United States

Demography

Abstract

Childlessness in the United States nearly doubled between 1980 and 2000. Other dramatic changes in the U.S. population also took place over this period—notably, women’s average educational attainment increased, and the proportion marrying declined—but the impact of these changes on childlessness has not been formally examined. In this article, I use data from the Current Population Survey Fertility Supplements (1995, 1998, 2004, 2008) and logistic regression and regression-based decomposition techniques to assess the contribution of changes in educational attainment, marriage behavior, and racial/ethnic composition on population levels of childlessness in the United States. Results show that increases in the proportion of women unmarried by age 40 contributed most to the increase in childlessness in the late twentieth century, although these increases were offset somewhat by increased childbearing among unmarried women. The rising proportion of women with a college degree also explained a substantial amount of the increase in childless women.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. As the number of childless women grows, the number of childless men has probably increased as well. (An increase in the number of childless women but no increase in the number of childless men is theoretically possible, if some women have children with multiple men and other women have no children.) Fatherhood is important in men’s lives (e.g., Eggebeen and Knoester 2001; Marsiglio and Pleck 2005; Nock 1998; Townsend 2002), and the consequences of possible increased childlessness for men may be significant. However, reliable data for studying trends in permanent childlessness among men do not exist. Therefore, this article discusses childlessness among women only.

  2. Postponement is, of course, mechanically linked to childlessness: women who have an early birth cannot then be childless, and childless women are those who have avoided having children first at young ages and then at successively older ages. Research also suggests that intentions to be childless are rare at young ages, and most permanently childless women reach terminal childlessness by repeatedly postponing the first birth (Hagewen and Morgan 2005; Hayford 2009).

  3. Some bias may be introduced by the fact that women are observed for a longer period in the 1995 survey than in the later surveys. The proportion of women who had a first birth between ages 45 and 65—that is, the proportion of women for whom a longer period of observation would lead to different conclusions—is 0.43 % of the sample in the 1995 CPS. Analyses treating these women as childless lead to nearly identical results.

  4. The Fertility Supplements of the Current Population Survey do not include questions about adoption, stepchildren, or foster children. As a result, analyses are limited to biological childlessness and do not address the distribution of social parenthood.

  5. In exploratory analyses, I conducted a decomposition analysis based on models without marital status–education interactions. In that analysis, the effects of education and of marital status were almost identical to the net effects (calculated by adding main effects and interaction terms) in the model with interactions. The similarity across models with and without interactions and the relatively small size of the interaction terms suggest that the impact of education and marital status trends on childlessness are mostly independent rather than joint.

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Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Population Association of America. I am grateful to Sam Hyun Yoo for superb research assistance, to Jenny Trinitapoli and the Social Dynamics Writing Group for helpful comments, to Jennifer Glick for brilliant creative contributions, and to Jennifer Van Hook for sharing SAS programs. Any remaining imperfections are, of course, my own.

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Correspondence to Sarah R. Hayford.

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Hayford, S.R. Marriage (Still) Matters: The Contribution of Demographic Change to Trends in Childlessness in the United States. Demography 50, 1641–1661 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-013-0215-3

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