01.18.18
Don't call it a baby boom just yet, but the statistics for childbearing are pointing upward.
The share of American women at the end of their childbearing years who have ever given birth was higher in 2016 than it was a decade earlier, reversing a near 40-year trend where fewer women in that age group were having babies, according to a government report. Some 86% of women ages 40 to 44 were mothers in 2016, up from 80% in 2006, according to an analysis released Thursday of US Census Bureau data by the Pew Research Center, a think tank in Washington, DC.
“Not only are women more likely to be mothers than in the past, but they are having more children,” the report found. Overall, women have an average of 2.07 children during their lives — up from 1.86 in 2006, the lowest number on record. And among those who are mothers, family size has actually increased. In 2016, mothers at the end of their childbearing years had about 2.42 children, compared with a low of 2.31 in 2008.
All those numbers should be good for baby care product marketers and their suppliers.
“The recent rise in motherhood and fertility might seem to run counter to the notion that the US is experiencing a post-recession ‘baby bust,’” Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher at Pew, wrote in the report. Pew’s analysis is based on a cumulative measure of lifetime fertility (the number of births a woman has ever had) while reports of declining US fertility are based on annual rates, which capture fertility at one point in time.
By that latter measure, however, fertility is still on a downward trajectory in the US. The St. Louis Federal Reserve reported 1.85 births per woman in 2015, down from 2.12 births per woman in 2007, but up from a low of 1.73 births per woman in 1976. However, those figures pale in comparison to 1960 when there were 3.65 births per woman.
The share of American women at the end of their childbearing years who have ever given birth was higher in 2016 than it was a decade earlier, reversing a near 40-year trend where fewer women in that age group were having babies, according to a government report. Some 86% of women ages 40 to 44 were mothers in 2016, up from 80% in 2006, according to an analysis released Thursday of US Census Bureau data by the Pew Research Center, a think tank in Washington, DC.
“Not only are women more likely to be mothers than in the past, but they are having more children,” the report found. Overall, women have an average of 2.07 children during their lives — up from 1.86 in 2006, the lowest number on record. And among those who are mothers, family size has actually increased. In 2016, mothers at the end of their childbearing years had about 2.42 children, compared with a low of 2.31 in 2008.
All those numbers should be good for baby care product marketers and their suppliers.
“The recent rise in motherhood and fertility might seem to run counter to the notion that the US is experiencing a post-recession ‘baby bust,’” Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher at Pew, wrote in the report. Pew’s analysis is based on a cumulative measure of lifetime fertility (the number of births a woman has ever had) while reports of declining US fertility are based on annual rates, which capture fertility at one point in time.
By that latter measure, however, fertility is still on a downward trajectory in the US. The St. Louis Federal Reserve reported 1.85 births per woman in 2015, down from 2.12 births per woman in 2007, but up from a low of 1.73 births per woman in 1976. However, those figures pale in comparison to 1960 when there were 3.65 births per woman.