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

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.

Children Benefit

The children of those women also benefit, Sawhill found. Preventing unexpected births lifts a child’s lifetime income by $52,000, according to Brookings’ study released yesterday. College and high school graduation rates both increase, while the chances of the child becoming a teen parent or being convicted of a crime decline.

“Delaying childbearing until you’re ready to be a parent is not just about improving your own life, it’s about giving your children greater opportunities in life,” Sawhill said.

The mean age of mothers having their first child was 25.8 years in 2012, up from 21.4 years in 1970, a December report from the health and human services department showed. Meanwhile, the cost for a middle-income family to raise a child born last year to the age of 18 is $245,340, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Women’s Education

Women’s gains in education are already beginning to outpace those of men. By the age of 27, 32 percent of women have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 24 percent of men, according to a March report outlining the results of a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of people born in the early 1980s.

That boosts their potential earnings power, as young adults with a bachelor’s degree earned $46,900 in 2012, 57 percent more than those who completed high school, data from the National Center for Education Statistics show.

“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.

“We’re seeing this big increase in women going to college and getting pretty good jobs and increasingly earning more than their husbands,” Mather said. “Along with that trend, there’s a bigger cost for women to have kids than there was in the past.”