Fewer Millennial Moms Show U.S. Birth Rate Drop Lasting.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-16/fewer-millennial-moms-show-u-s-birth-rate-drop-lasting.html

Janna Weaver is proud she’s managed to keep her bamboo plant alive for more than a year. She’s not quite ready for a pet yet, and a child? “Definitely not anytime soon.”

“I want to know who I am before I bring someone else into the equation,” said Weaver, 25, who has a master’s degree in exercise physiology and moved with her boyfriend to Dallas in July. “The longer I wait and the more established I am, the more I’ll be able to provide for the family.”

More U.S. millennial women, those born after 1980, are holding off on motherhood, which bodes well for their economic and social mobility and that of their future children, according to recent research. Odds are that lower U.S. birth rates are here to stay, even if some of the recession-induced decline reverses, said Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Fewer teens than ever had babies last year -- 26.6 per 1,000 women, down 57 percent since 1991, according to an August report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that analyzed data back to 1940. For women 20 to 24 years old, the birth rate also reached a record low, a separateanalysis showed, while a decline continued for those 25 to 29 years old.

While a falling birth rate is viewed with alarm by some economists as a drag on growth, others see it as an educational and earnings boon to young women and their children.

More Choices

“Women have a lot more choice than in the past about how many children to have and when to have them,” Sawhill said in an interview. “If more people were able to align their fertility with their own desires, we would have less child poverty, we would have more social mobility and we would have lower government costs for things like safety-net programs and supporting single parents. It’s a win-win scenario.”

For each year motherhood is delayed, career earnings increase by 9 percent, work experience by 6 percent and average wage rates by 3 percent, according to a 2011 paper by Amalia Miller, an associate professor of economics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Women who have college degrees and jobs in professional and managerial fields see the greatest gains, she found.

“Later first births allow women more time to invest in schooling, work experience and on-the-job training that will, on average, increase their lifetime wages,” Miller wrote in an e-mail.

“The fact that millennial women’s college attainment has increased both in absolute terms and relative to men suggests that future trends for human-capital development, income growth and ultimately consumer spending are positive,” William Emmons, senior economic adviser at the Center for Household Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, wrote in an e-mail.

As households become increasingly dependent on female employment and earnings, U.S. fertility rates will probably continue to decline, said Mark Mather, associate vice president of domestic programs at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. Employed married women’s earnings are now 44 percent of their families’ total, up from 37 percent in the 1970s, according to a presentation earlier this year from President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.