I can't remember how much of the Baby Boom's fertility boost was associated with higher marriage rates (as opposed to higher married TFR), but IIRC it's a lot of it. I'm sure it's not a coincidence that it happened at a time when marriage rates were spiking and that its end coincided with divorce rates soaring in the 1970s.
I can't remember how much of the Baby Boom's fertility boost was associated with higher marriage rates (as opposed to higher married TFR), but IIRC it's a lot of it. I'm sure it's not a coincidence that it happened at a time when marriage rates were spiking and that its end coincided with divorce rates soaring in the 1970s.
So I think a good part of the conformity has to do with marriage itself. Which honestly aligns more with my lived experience. A lot of people just don't look much outside their own family unit to decide if they should have one more kid. They're much more focused on thinking about their own lives and what another kid means to them. But single culture is very real; if everyone you know is married by their mid-20s, then being single is that much lonelier and you're prepared to compromise more in your choice of mate (plus everyone is trying to set you up and marry you off). If a lot of people around you are single into their 30s, then being single throughout your 20s is not so bad, no hurry.
Even if you eventually get married either way, you're likely to end up with more kids the earlier you marry. A longtime friend of my mother's is a case in point: she has 3 kids, born when she was 24, 26, and 36. Maybe the last was an accident, or maybe she just felt a last twinge of baby fever with both kids becoming more independent, I don't know. But it's a good bet that if she had started at 34 instead of 24, she'd have ended up with 2 kids at most.
Bingo, you also see this affect with remarriages. In my experience women tend to have at least one kid per spouse after the initial child hence often a rainbow brood. Marriages tend to lead children hence the more marriages, even if accompanied by more divorces, more children.
BTW one thing I've always wondered but never looked into is how TFR accounts for that. When I hear numbers like 2.5 is replacement as "both parents and a spare" I feel that skews if one woman, multiple men. If hypothetically only eleven people existed on earth and those ten guys each had one kid with the remaining woman, you get a TFR or 10 which sounds great until you realize it's still a population decline. I think this same error scales up skewing the replacement level though by how much, I don't know.
I'm skeptical that divorce + remarriage on average results in a fertility increase for a woman as opposed to staying married to a single man. Though I'm sure it does in some cases, especially if she was content to have only one child in her first marriage. And after the divorce is a fait accompli, remarriage is of course more likely to yield more children than never remarrying.
Possibly, it's definitely something I love to see a paper on as would be interesting, at least to me, to see the data on that. Definitely anecdotal but my lived experience I feel remarriages result in an increased total fertility, i.e. she might have only wanted 1-3 kids but the next husband does to hence you see broods like (ages) 21, 19, 18, 5, and 3. Or serial marriagers (yes not a real word) 1, 4, 6, 7, 11, 18 four different last names. Seen a lot of the former in middle class families, lot of the latter in poor families IME.
I'll admit I've never known a woman married thrice who had children in all three marriages. Though I don't think I've even known a woman who was married thrice in her fertile years.
A friend of mine once employed a woman who had 4 children by 4 men (and still young enough to have more) -- she was, of course, never married to any of them, which is the norm for the lower classes in the US. The situation you describe, of 4+ children by 4 husbands, has to be extraordinarily rare.
So I think the core question is which tends to result in more children: two husbands before age 40, or one? And yeah, someone surely has access to data to figure that out, but a quick search didn't yield anything.
I'll add that in either case, divorce is still generally a negative for fertility, since a lot of women don't get remarried (many fewer women than men, in fact), and if they do, it might be outside her fertility window, or at least towards the end of it. Plus many second marriages don't last long.
But that error can't scale up, because no one is making it. It's an error that only exists in your mind.
You compare children per woman to the female share of the population. There are no populations that are 91% male. But if there were, you'd still compare children per woman to the female share of the population. (In your example, 10 children per woman does not balance the woman's 9% share of the population. 10 x 9.09% tells you that the next generation will be 91% of the size of this one.)
Two children per woman is just the inverse of women being half the population. It has nothing to do with how many parents each child has.
(The replacement level does skew because of losses; not all children reproduce. So replacement is usually taken as 2.2 or so. But note that while the failure of some people in the _next_ generation to reproduce does affect the replacement rate, the failure of some people in the _current_ generation does not.)
Fair, as I said I never looked into how they derived the math and a quick wiki prior to that post wasn't clear on it either. While I understand how they figured out TFR that didn't really explain how they figured out replacement rate. Still not clear on that TBH.
Well, I can give you some highly stylized examples. The replacement rate is defined as the average rate that leads to the population staying constant over time. Assume everyone bears children between the ages of 15 and 40 and then dies at the age of 80. Assume exactly half of people are female.
If you have a population composed entirely of 20 year olds, the replacement rate as defined above looks weird. If those people have any number of children, 30 years later the population will be larger, because some children were added but nobody has reached the age of 80 and died. (But if they have a total of zero children, then 30 years later the population will be the same -- everyone's still alive -- but at that point they've all lost the ability to bear children and 40 years after that the population will be zero.) So we want to think about the replacement rate in terms of a society where the age structure is stable, too. In the all-20-year-olds example, the replacement rate is 2, but the population hasn't yet reached equilibrium.
With that out of the way, if everyone dies at the age of 80, it's greater than the maximum childbearing age of 40, and so the replacement rate is exactly two. If women were instead a third of all people, the replacement rate would be three children per woman or 1.5 per man.
But, in reality sometimes people die before they reach 80. This affects our ability to measure the fertility rate -- if you survey everyone when they reach 12, the fertility rate will be zero because it's impossible to have children before the age of 15. If you survey everyone at 20, the fertility rate will be positive, but low, because that's only 5 years in to a 25-year fertility period. If you survey everyone on a regular schedule, say every 10 years, the fertility rate will be a composite of people matching the age structure of society, and while it is possible to work with that figure, it is undesirable for many reasons.
So we like to measure the "completed fertility rate", which is established by surveying menopausal women. If you survey people when they're 50, you get a good picture of how many children they will produce over the course of their life, because it's impossible for them to produce children in the future. (In reality, outside the examples, this is only impossible for women, which is one good reason we measure female fertility instead of male. The other is that women are much more likely to be aware of all of their children.)
But by surveying menopausal women, we lose information about women who died before menopause. Those women would have been counted in the fertility rate of the previous generation, but they don't contribute to the following generation. (Sometimes they do! Maybe someone had a child at 16 and died at 17. This is a complicated adjustment that needs to be made.)
Suppose half of women die at the age of 10, and the other half die at 80. (And half of births continue to be female.) Now we know that the replacement rate is 4 children per woman: for the population to remain stable, every woman who reaches childbearing age at all must on average bear four children, one to die fruitlessly and three to reproduce. And if we have such a population, and we survey the 50-year-old women, we will in fact find that they have borne an average of four children each.
Arguably, FFR is what matters - female fertility rate. The population of women is stable if you have something like 1.05 girls per woman. So, if 11 people exist on earth - 10 of them men - then you have 1 woman. If half of the 10 kids are girls, you have an FFR of 5, which is rockin'. As for the 5 boys, they can compete to be the one who fathers 10 children with each of the 5 girls, I guess.
I started at 34, had my 4th at 45 ( all healthy. Ignore the silly statistics about a minute increase in chance of chromosomal issues. That has more to do with genetics than age of the mother). If the woman is very healthy and wants kids, it’s not the terrible thing people think it is.
It is relevant. I live in a high TFR community. Sure, I am on the small end of family size here, but I am still in child-bearing range. I could have had another 2 if my husband had wanted to. Men looking for large families, but are no longer under 25, need not limit their search to a certain age bracket. Fertility health is a much more important factor to family size than an age range that cuts off half of the population of fertile women. Since most women- including myself- are not interested in kids first/ education and career second, we should include women on the older end of the spectrum in our efforts to improve TFR. Many people of both genders deal with lifestyle related infertility. The ones who regret not having kids, pretty much prove that older women still want children. If they are encouraged to live a healthier lifestyle, it’s possible. As an aside, I will mention I never used ABC in my life, and I suspect that has something to do with the rise in infertility.
I can't remember how much of the Baby Boom's fertility boost was associated with higher marriage rates (as opposed to higher married TFR), but IIRC it's a lot of it. I'm sure it's not a coincidence that it happened at a time when marriage rates were spiking and that its end coincided with divorce rates soaring in the 1970s.
So I think a good part of the conformity has to do with marriage itself. Which honestly aligns more with my lived experience. A lot of people just don't look much outside their own family unit to decide if they should have one more kid. They're much more focused on thinking about their own lives and what another kid means to them. But single culture is very real; if everyone you know is married by their mid-20s, then being single is that much lonelier and you're prepared to compromise more in your choice of mate (plus everyone is trying to set you up and marry you off). If a lot of people around you are single into their 30s, then being single throughout your 20s is not so bad, no hurry.
Even if you eventually get married either way, you're likely to end up with more kids the earlier you marry. A longtime friend of my mother's is a case in point: she has 3 kids, born when she was 24, 26, and 36. Maybe the last was an accident, or maybe she just felt a last twinge of baby fever with both kids becoming more independent, I don't know. But it's a good bet that if she had started at 34 instead of 24, she'd have ended up with 2 kids at most.
Bingo, you also see this affect with remarriages. In my experience women tend to have at least one kid per spouse after the initial child hence often a rainbow brood. Marriages tend to lead children hence the more marriages, even if accompanied by more divorces, more children.
BTW one thing I've always wondered but never looked into is how TFR accounts for that. When I hear numbers like 2.5 is replacement as "both parents and a spare" I feel that skews if one woman, multiple men. If hypothetically only eleven people existed on earth and those ten guys each had one kid with the remaining woman, you get a TFR or 10 which sounds great until you realize it's still a population decline. I think this same error scales up skewing the replacement level though by how much, I don't know.
I'm skeptical that divorce + remarriage on average results in a fertility increase for a woman as opposed to staying married to a single man. Though I'm sure it does in some cases, especially if she was content to have only one child in her first marriage. And after the divorce is a fait accompli, remarriage is of course more likely to yield more children than never remarrying.
Possibly, it's definitely something I love to see a paper on as would be interesting, at least to me, to see the data on that. Definitely anecdotal but my lived experience I feel remarriages result in an increased total fertility, i.e. she might have only wanted 1-3 kids but the next husband does to hence you see broods like (ages) 21, 19, 18, 5, and 3. Or serial marriagers (yes not a real word) 1, 4, 6, 7, 11, 18 four different last names. Seen a lot of the former in middle class families, lot of the latter in poor families IME.
I'll admit I've never known a woman married thrice who had children in all three marriages. Though I don't think I've even known a woman who was married thrice in her fertile years.
A friend of mine once employed a woman who had 4 children by 4 men (and still young enough to have more) -- she was, of course, never married to any of them, which is the norm for the lower classes in the US. The situation you describe, of 4+ children by 4 husbands, has to be extraordinarily rare.
So I think the core question is which tends to result in more children: two husbands before age 40, or one? And yeah, someone surely has access to data to figure that out, but a quick search didn't yield anything.
I'll add that in either case, divorce is still generally a negative for fertility, since a lot of women don't get remarried (many fewer women than men, in fact), and if they do, it might be outside her fertility window, or at least towards the end of it. Plus many second marriages don't last long.
But that error can't scale up, because no one is making it. It's an error that only exists in your mind.
You compare children per woman to the female share of the population. There are no populations that are 91% male. But if there were, you'd still compare children per woman to the female share of the population. (In your example, 10 children per woman does not balance the woman's 9% share of the population. 10 x 9.09% tells you that the next generation will be 91% of the size of this one.)
Two children per woman is just the inverse of women being half the population. It has nothing to do with how many parents each child has.
(The replacement level does skew because of losses; not all children reproduce. So replacement is usually taken as 2.2 or so. But note that while the failure of some people in the _next_ generation to reproduce does affect the replacement rate, the failure of some people in the _current_ generation does not.)
Fair, as I said I never looked into how they derived the math and a quick wiki prior to that post wasn't clear on it either. While I understand how they figured out TFR that didn't really explain how they figured out replacement rate. Still not clear on that TBH.
Well, I can give you some highly stylized examples. The replacement rate is defined as the average rate that leads to the population staying constant over time. Assume everyone bears children between the ages of 15 and 40 and then dies at the age of 80. Assume exactly half of people are female.
If you have a population composed entirely of 20 year olds, the replacement rate as defined above looks weird. If those people have any number of children, 30 years later the population will be larger, because some children were added but nobody has reached the age of 80 and died. (But if they have a total of zero children, then 30 years later the population will be the same -- everyone's still alive -- but at that point they've all lost the ability to bear children and 40 years after that the population will be zero.) So we want to think about the replacement rate in terms of a society where the age structure is stable, too. In the all-20-year-olds example, the replacement rate is 2, but the population hasn't yet reached equilibrium.
With that out of the way, if everyone dies at the age of 80, it's greater than the maximum childbearing age of 40, and so the replacement rate is exactly two. If women were instead a third of all people, the replacement rate would be three children per woman or 1.5 per man.
But, in reality sometimes people die before they reach 80. This affects our ability to measure the fertility rate -- if you survey everyone when they reach 12, the fertility rate will be zero because it's impossible to have children before the age of 15. If you survey everyone at 20, the fertility rate will be positive, but low, because that's only 5 years in to a 25-year fertility period. If you survey everyone on a regular schedule, say every 10 years, the fertility rate will be a composite of people matching the age structure of society, and while it is possible to work with that figure, it is undesirable for many reasons.
So we like to measure the "completed fertility rate", which is established by surveying menopausal women. If you survey people when they're 50, you get a good picture of how many children they will produce over the course of their life, because it's impossible for them to produce children in the future. (In reality, outside the examples, this is only impossible for women, which is one good reason we measure female fertility instead of male. The other is that women are much more likely to be aware of all of their children.)
But by surveying menopausal women, we lose information about women who died before menopause. Those women would have been counted in the fertility rate of the previous generation, but they don't contribute to the following generation. (Sometimes they do! Maybe someone had a child at 16 and died at 17. This is a complicated adjustment that needs to be made.)
Suppose half of women die at the age of 10, and the other half die at 80. (And half of births continue to be female.) Now we know that the replacement rate is 4 children per woman: for the population to remain stable, every woman who reaches childbearing age at all must on average bear four children, one to die fruitlessly and three to reproduce. And if we have such a population, and we survey the 50-year-old women, we will in fact find that they have borne an average of four children each.
Arguably, FFR is what matters - female fertility rate. The population of women is stable if you have something like 1.05 girls per woman. So, if 11 people exist on earth - 10 of them men - then you have 1 woman. If half of the 10 kids are girls, you have an FFR of 5, which is rockin'. As for the 5 boys, they can compete to be the one who fathers 10 children with each of the 5 girls, I guess.
I started at 34, had my 4th at 45 ( all healthy. Ignore the silly statistics about a minute increase in chance of chromosomal issues. That has more to do with genetics than age of the mother). If the woman is very healthy and wants kids, it’s not the terrible thing people think it is.
Valid enough as individual advice but my comment was focused on macro explanations, and your fertility history is a far outlier.
It is relevant. I live in a high TFR community. Sure, I am on the small end of family size here, but I am still in child-bearing range. I could have had another 2 if my husband had wanted to. Men looking for large families, but are no longer under 25, need not limit their search to a certain age bracket. Fertility health is a much more important factor to family size than an age range that cuts off half of the population of fertile women. Since most women- including myself- are not interested in kids first/ education and career second, we should include women on the older end of the spectrum in our efforts to improve TFR. Many people of both genders deal with lifestyle related infertility. The ones who regret not having kids, pretty much prove that older women still want children. If they are encouraged to live a healthier lifestyle, it’s possible. As an aside, I will mention I never used ABC in my life, and I suspect that has something to do with the rise in infertility.