'Neat Mom' currently has over 1.1 million followers, but if all conditions remain the same, this number is likely to increase. Contrary to what many believe, the share of U.S. women at the end of their childbearing years who have ever given birth was higher in 2016 than it had been 10 years earlier.
According to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, some 86% of women ages 40 to 44 are mothers, compared with 80% in 2006.
Not only are women more likely to be mothers than in the past, but they are also having more children. Overall, women have 2.07 children during their lives on average – up from 1.86 in 2006, the lowest number that has been recorded.
The recent rise in motherhood and fertility might seem to run counter to the notion that the U.S. had experienced a post-recession “Baby Bust.”
(However, it's worth mentioning that each trend is based on a different type of measurement. The analysis here is based on a cumulative measure of lifetime fertility, the number of births a woman has ever had; meantime, reports of declining U.S. fertility are usually based on annual rates, which capture fertility at one point in time.)
One reason driving down annual fertility rates is that women are becoming mothers later in life. The median age at which women become mothers in the U.S. is 26, compared with 23 in 1994.
This change has been caused in part by declines in births to teens. In the mid-1990s, about one-in-five women in their early 40s (22%) had had a child prior to age 20; in 2014, that share had dropped to 13%.
Delays in childbearing have continued among women in their 20s: while slightly more than half (53%) of women in their early 40s in 1994 had become mothers by age 24, this share was 39% among those who were in this age group in 2014.
The Great Recession intensified this shift toward later motherhood, which has been driven in the longer term by increases in educational attainment and women’s labor force participation, as well as delays in marriage.
Given these social and cultural shifts, it seems likely that the postponement of childbearing will continue in the near future.
But will the recent annual declines in fertility lead U.S. women to have smaller families? It is difficult to answer, but comparing the lifetime fertility of women who just recently completed their childbearing years with those 20 years earlier suggests that postponing births does not necessarily equate with lower lifetime fertility.
