Yeah, I kind of did that (only kind of. Because I struggled through an MSc then two years of a career before doing that). Had my first child at 28. Third and probably final child at 31. I still have time to start my career. What I did (3 kids in 3 years) definitely isn’t advisable from a maternal or indeed neonatal health perspective. I made out like a bandit in that gamble. I recovered very well, and my children are without the side effects closely spaced births. Now this seems like the thing I should have done, but even earlier. If a woman wanted to have it all, this seems like the clearly superior strategy. You can peak in your career a lot later than your fertility.
For this to work govt would need to find a way to help support young moms, who would otherwise be paying off student loans while surviving on spouse’s sole income and trying to raise kids. There are possibilities: student loan deferment, more generous child tax credit, “abundance “ policies to lower cost of housing.
It is sort of weird how little attention the changing age demographics of mothers (and also fathers) gets, given that empirically almost all the decline in fertility is due to declines in teen and early to mid 20s pregnancy, with older ages at historical peaks. Once you realize this the obvious causes of low TFR seem to be stuff like education/long career paths etc. resulting in later family formation.
I don't know that I've seen it explicitly discussed in anything academic, but I feel like there's been plenty of discussion about the mechanism of extending the time to complete education de facto extending the time before trying to get pregnant?
But I don't think the issue is the stigma against having kids before finishing education. I think it's mainly about money. There is a stigma against getting married before finishing your bachelor's degree, which basically has the same effect as a stigma against having babies when paired with the stigma against having babies out of wedlock. I do think the stigma against getting married before a bachelors degree is largely that it's associated with low status, but I think part of the way it became low status is the stigma against proposing to a wife that you can't financially support. We had one friend that got married before their senior year of college and everybody was just flabbergasted that they were married and still being supported by their parents.
But being married in graduate school is much less uncommon. Outside of medical students, I don't think there is an educational track that can credibly claim that it actually gets easier to manage kids time-wise after starting a job. People that want kids should, absent money concerns, want to have kids in grad or professional school when it will be easier. But they don't, partly because how are they going to pay for daycare while their in school? And probably a bigger part of the money thing is that people want to enjoy a few years with money before they have the responsibility of kids. It was pretty common in our circle of friends to go on a pretty big trip or two in the last year before trying to get pregnant, knowing that it may be years before they can do certain types of trips again.
And the people in our social circle that had kids immediately after finishing school (or sometimes in school if it was medical or law school), were uniformly well off with parents willing and able to help not just financially but with watching kids. Having kids just would not impact their lifestyle the same way, so there wasn't a reason to wait for them and plenty of reasons to have kids sooner (e.g., younger and healthier grandparents to help babysit).
This is actually bad news because I think the only way to really address this is to reduce credentialism and encourage people to finish school earlier. Changing any perceived stigma about having kids before completing education won't address the money issues.
Theoretically every aspect of having a kid can be stigmatized! Women and men when conceptualized as a single entity in marriage/ partnership are stigmatized for never having kids and focusing on school AND having kids while in school AND having kids while not in school! I agree that the stigma concerns money and people who immediately launch into rhetoric that blames low fertility on perceived lack of inclination toward responsibility are not seeing the whole picture.
My wife and I had our first child during my junior year and her senior year in college in the US. The second child came 2 months after my graduation. It was very difficult, and I ended-up dropping-out of a PhD program within the first semester due to the pressures of being a breadwinner. I have no regrets whatsoever, as going on to get a PhD in computer science would have been possibly the worst financial decision of our adult lives, missing out on 4 or 5 years of a booming software sector in the early 2010s. Add that to having our four children being 4 of the best decisions of our lives, and we feel incredibly blessed with the way things have turned out.
Any proposed solutions to our collapsing demographics should start by addressing the point Bryan (and others) raised. We need to get very creative and quickly-- think streamlining K-12 would do wonders.
I have seen this explanation for the education—->low fertility effect quite a lot of times. No idea you could have not thought of it sooner or at least seen someone mention it.
Does having children lower status vis a vis similar peers that don't have children (or less children, or later children)?
That is the problem you need to solve. The impact of a marginal child on status relevant to peers.
This is a solvable problem. It's just a matter of financial and cultural incentives that will build on one another.
The problem is that the costs are upfront and the payoff is far in the future. Childbirth has historically been the opposite (the "payoff" was quite immediate and the costs were far I the future).
Very hard to make a necessary change in a country where the median voter is 55 years of age and growing.
This is another (often overlooked) reason why fertility rates are collapsing in Latin America. The share of population with a tertiary education is already high - still increasing - and undergraduate studies require an extra year or two to complete compared with most other countries.
The mechanism is likely that additional years of education cause women to delay marriage. There is a very strong correlation between age of first marriage for woman and fertility.
There is also the current social norm that a woman should establish a career before having children, which is really ass-backwards.
Given biology and the dating market, it makes far more sense for women to get married by 25 and then have 2-3 children. The children can then all be old enough for school by the time she is 35 years old. Now she has an unbroken 30 years to focus on her career or part-time work before she retires.
In other words, it should be Education > Marriage > Children > Career
That makes far more sense than the current Education > Career > Marriage > Children > Back to Career and struggle to make up for lost time model.
I'm skeptical this applies to graduate school as there doesn't seem to be any stigma to having children as a graduate student -- indeed in many ways it's the perfect time.
I wonder if grad students do have children at a lower rate than similarly highly demanding career paths.
Graduate school is either professional or academic MA or PhD. Professional: yes, there's a cost to kids. In law school it'd be brutally difficult. In med school, close to impossible. MBA, you don't want to be on the job market pregnant or just having had a kid.
Academic: not sure about MA, but PhD has tons of years of uncertainty. Almost certainly a woman getting a PhD isn't terribly interested in having kids anyway.
Yes, I agree that people in grad school aren't likely to have kids. I just don't necessarily think he's identified the right mechanism for graduate school -- that it's looked down on to have kids in school the way it is with college. I've known women who had kids in grad school and it's not looked down on its, as you say, they are likely career focused anyway, kids make it difficult to advance in the career (not about ppl looking down on it just time and ppl recognizing that time cost) and there is the issue of $ and uncertainty.
Solid post. Two interesting “counter examples.” 1) Latter-day Saints have children while still in graduate school. Education levels are still pretty high. 2) Charles Darwin’s wife gave birth to 10 children. One as late as age 48.
In conclusion, you can still be a hard working scholar and have a bunch of kids, but it takes a culture of fertility to bring it about. Better religion might be a better way of increasing fertility. Your self-help program might benefit from a few fertility tweaks.
Came here to say this. I went to law school in Utah, and well over half my classmates had already had children, or had children, while in law school. At least 80% of us were married, even though the class had lots of non-Mormond (though I also have to admit many later divorced). Many of them had had their first child in college.
There is no reason it can't be done that way, other than cultural expectations. Mormons don't expect to party their way through college and grad school. Theyre not missing out on parties and drunken binges and hook-ups if they have kids, because they won't be doing those things regardless. Most college students would very much feel like they were missing out if they didn't get to party during college, and kids would ruin it for them. That's the main difference.
Yep. We just moved from a neighborhood in Meridian, Idaho that was full of young LDS families. The fathers were doctors, lawyers and professionals of some type, many with three or four kids. They have kids throughout college and graduate school.
You’re completely correct about the partying. We visited BYU and were shocked at the lack of party atmosphere. Not part of their culture. All good for having more children. Thanks for your comment.
It was about 15 years ago actually. Though half my class wasn't actually Mormon, I think they influenced everyone else a bit. Now the other way around though, they're not dominant and have been influenced by outsiders.
Women who have children younger do not experience as much fertility decline as childless women. But anecdotally, I know a lot of women who have never used contraception and had their first child in their early twenties and most of them have their final child in their early 40s. They may conceive after that, but usually the pregnancies in miscarriage. I think the latest natural conception and birth I know personally was to a 45 year old mother.
Very solid, but not 100%. I dated "for marriage" while in college (because religious community) but dreaded the idea of actually getting married because I knew it would be followed by children.
That said, I had very many friends who either got married in college and delayed children or got married and slogged through with children.
The thing is, I really wanted more children than I have. And the reason I don't have those additional children is simply this: having babies sucks. When you have an education it means you've experienced adult life without children and you realize that it doesn't have to suck. Since you must actively choose to conceive each baby, it's like deciding to take a polar bear plunge each time. And at some point you just say "you know what, I've had enough."
You're only saying that because you've never lost 5 years of your life to a single baby, let alone the mental committment after that to staying on top of their many needs for the next 20 years. At some point you are sacrificing quality for quantity, and the the world is full of messed up "quantities."
I’m not engaging in a pissing contest. I have a lot of respect for people who can handle five kids well; I have doubts that I could, aside from the physical, mental, and monetary costs involved. I’ve spent my entire life investing in my future and I’m 38 and I’m ready to enjoy some of that future. And there’s no way to know whether the kid(s) I didn’t have would have been a blessing or a curse. Because you really never know until you’ve put in that 20-year investment and seen how things turned out.
"But my obvious-once-you-think-about mechanism implies an extra point of leverage: undermine the norm against students having babies."
Or, undermine the norm that having a lot of education is needed for most people in the labor market.
Or undermine the norm that your career needs to start at age 23, rather than at age 30-35 when your youngest kid starts kindergarten.
Yeah, I kind of did that (only kind of. Because I struggled through an MSc then two years of a career before doing that). Had my first child at 28. Third and probably final child at 31. I still have time to start my career. What I did (3 kids in 3 years) definitely isn’t advisable from a maternal or indeed neonatal health perspective. I made out like a bandit in that gamble. I recovered very well, and my children are without the side effects closely spaced births. Now this seems like the thing I should have done, but even earlier. If a woman wanted to have it all, this seems like the clearly superior strategy. You can peak in your career a lot later than your fertility.
For this to work govt would need to find a way to help support young moms, who would otherwise be paying off student loans while surviving on spouse’s sole income and trying to raise kids. There are possibilities: student loan deferment, more generous child tax credit, “abundance “ policies to lower cost of housing.
It is sort of weird how little attention the changing age demographics of mothers (and also fathers) gets, given that empirically almost all the decline in fertility is due to declines in teen and early to mid 20s pregnancy, with older ages at historical peaks. Once you realize this the obvious causes of low TFR seem to be stuff like education/long career paths etc. resulting in later family formation.
I don't know that I've seen it explicitly discussed in anything academic, but I feel like there's been plenty of discussion about the mechanism of extending the time to complete education de facto extending the time before trying to get pregnant?
But I don't think the issue is the stigma against having kids before finishing education. I think it's mainly about money. There is a stigma against getting married before finishing your bachelor's degree, which basically has the same effect as a stigma against having babies when paired with the stigma against having babies out of wedlock. I do think the stigma against getting married before a bachelors degree is largely that it's associated with low status, but I think part of the way it became low status is the stigma against proposing to a wife that you can't financially support. We had one friend that got married before their senior year of college and everybody was just flabbergasted that they were married and still being supported by their parents.
But being married in graduate school is much less uncommon. Outside of medical students, I don't think there is an educational track that can credibly claim that it actually gets easier to manage kids time-wise after starting a job. People that want kids should, absent money concerns, want to have kids in grad or professional school when it will be easier. But they don't, partly because how are they going to pay for daycare while their in school? And probably a bigger part of the money thing is that people want to enjoy a few years with money before they have the responsibility of kids. It was pretty common in our circle of friends to go on a pretty big trip or two in the last year before trying to get pregnant, knowing that it may be years before they can do certain types of trips again.
And the people in our social circle that had kids immediately after finishing school (or sometimes in school if it was medical or law school), were uniformly well off with parents willing and able to help not just financially but with watching kids. Having kids just would not impact their lifestyle the same way, so there wasn't a reason to wait for them and plenty of reasons to have kids sooner (e.g., younger and healthier grandparents to help babysit).
This is actually bad news because I think the only way to really address this is to reduce credentialism and encourage people to finish school earlier. Changing any perceived stigma about having kids before completing education won't address the money issues.
Theoretically every aspect of having a kid can be stigmatized! Women and men when conceptualized as a single entity in marriage/ partnership are stigmatized for never having kids and focusing on school AND having kids while in school AND having kids while not in school! I agree that the stigma concerns money and people who immediately launch into rhetoric that blames low fertility on perceived lack of inclination toward responsibility are not seeing the whole picture.
My wife and I had our first child during my junior year and her senior year in college in the US. The second child came 2 months after my graduation. It was very difficult, and I ended-up dropping-out of a PhD program within the first semester due to the pressures of being a breadwinner. I have no regrets whatsoever, as going on to get a PhD in computer science would have been possibly the worst financial decision of our adult lives, missing out on 4 or 5 years of a booming software sector in the early 2010s. Add that to having our four children being 4 of the best decisions of our lives, and we feel incredibly blessed with the way things have turned out.
Implies that fertility is actually tractable. We know that K-12 is incredibly wasteful for college-bound students. Learning could be much faster
If we can create a route to a bachelors degree at even 19 or 20, that is a 20% increase in available easy fertility window (no IVF/etc needed).
Any proposed solutions to our collapsing demographics should start by addressing the point Bryan (and others) raised. We need to get very creative and quickly-- think streamlining K-12 would do wonders.
We? Is there a english speaking state with horrible demographics?
I have seen this explanation for the education—->low fertility effect quite a lot of times. No idea you could have not thought of it sooner or at least seen someone mention it.
"...I can’t recall anyone explicitly naming it as a possible explanation for the education-fertility connection."
You cannot possibly be serious. EVERYONE explicitly names it as a big part of the explanation for the education-fertility connection.
The other part of it is that more education generally leads to a higher salary.
Affordability is irrelevant.
Does having children lower status vis a vis similar peers that don't have children (or less children, or later children)?
That is the problem you need to solve. The impact of a marginal child on status relevant to peers.
This is a solvable problem. It's just a matter of financial and cultural incentives that will build on one another.
The problem is that the costs are upfront and the payoff is far in the future. Childbirth has historically been the opposite (the "payoff" was quite immediate and the costs were far I the future).
Very hard to make a necessary change in a country where the median voter is 55 years of age and growing.
I always thought this was part of the standard package of explanations.
This is another (often overlooked) reason why fertility rates are collapsing in Latin America. The share of population with a tertiary education is already high - still increasing - and undergraduate studies require an extra year or two to complete compared with most other countries.
The mechanism is likely that additional years of education cause women to delay marriage. There is a very strong correlation between age of first marriage for woman and fertility.
There is also the current social norm that a woman should establish a career before having children, which is really ass-backwards.
Given biology and the dating market, it makes far more sense for women to get married by 25 and then have 2-3 children. The children can then all be old enough for school by the time she is 35 years old. Now she has an unbroken 30 years to focus on her career or part-time work before she retires.
In other words, it should be Education > Marriage > Children > Career
That makes far more sense than the current Education > Career > Marriage > Children > Back to Career and struggle to make up for lost time model.
I'm skeptical this applies to graduate school as there doesn't seem to be any stigma to having children as a graduate student -- indeed in many ways it's the perfect time.
I wonder if grad students do have children at a lower rate than similarly highly demanding career paths.
Graduate school is either professional or academic MA or PhD. Professional: yes, there's a cost to kids. In law school it'd be brutally difficult. In med school, close to impossible. MBA, you don't want to be on the job market pregnant or just having had a kid.
Academic: not sure about MA, but PhD has tons of years of uncertainty. Almost certainly a woman getting a PhD isn't terribly interested in having kids anyway.
Yes, I agree that people in grad school aren't likely to have kids. I just don't necessarily think he's identified the right mechanism for graduate school -- that it's looked down on to have kids in school the way it is with college. I've known women who had kids in grad school and it's not looked down on its, as you say, they are likely career focused anyway, kids make it difficult to advance in the career (not about ppl looking down on it just time and ppl recognizing that time cost) and there is the issue of $ and uncertainty.
Can't you just compare the fertility rate of uneducated versus educated people with the same level of income?
Solid post. Two interesting “counter examples.” 1) Latter-day Saints have children while still in graduate school. Education levels are still pretty high. 2) Charles Darwin’s wife gave birth to 10 children. One as late as age 48.
In conclusion, you can still be a hard working scholar and have a bunch of kids, but it takes a culture of fertility to bring it about. Better religion might be a better way of increasing fertility. Your self-help program might benefit from a few fertility tweaks.
Came here to say this. I went to law school in Utah, and well over half my classmates had already had children, or had children, while in law school. At least 80% of us were married, even though the class had lots of non-Mormond (though I also have to admit many later divorced). Many of them had had their first child in college.
There is no reason it can't be done that way, other than cultural expectations. Mormons don't expect to party their way through college and grad school. Theyre not missing out on parties and drunken binges and hook-ups if they have kids, because they won't be doing those things regardless. Most college students would very much feel like they were missing out if they didn't get to party during college, and kids would ruin it for them. That's the main difference.
Yep. We just moved from a neighborhood in Meridian, Idaho that was full of young LDS families. The fathers were doctors, lawyers and professionals of some type, many with three or four kids. They have kids throughout college and graduate school.
You’re completely correct about the partying. We visited BYU and were shocked at the lack of party atmosphere. Not part of their culture. All good for having more children. Thanks for your comment.
When did you attend law school?
If it was over 15 years ago, then that's not a proof, as it was before the Mormon/LDS TFR crashed.
It was about 15 years ago actually. Though half my class wasn't actually Mormon, I think they influenced everyone else a bit. Now the other way around though, they're not dominant and have been influenced by outsiders.
I suggest that Charles Darwin’s wife having a child at age 48 was unusual, especially at the time.
It would be fascinating if the opposite were true. It makes me wonder how age of last birth has changed over time. Who wants to dig up that data?
Women who have children younger do not experience as much fertility decline as childless women. But anecdotally, I know a lot of women who have never used contraception and had their first child in their early twenties and most of them have their final child in their early 40s. They may conceive after that, but usually the pregnancies in miscarriage. I think the latest natural conception and birth I know personally was to a 45 year old mother.
Here’s my reference.
https://substack.com/profile/39148689-scott-gibb/note/c-74450510?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=nb3bl
Very solid, but not 100%. I dated "for marriage" while in college (because religious community) but dreaded the idea of actually getting married because I knew it would be followed by children.
That said, I had very many friends who either got married in college and delayed children or got married and slogged through with children.
The thing is, I really wanted more children than I have. And the reason I don't have those additional children is simply this: having babies sucks. When you have an education it means you've experienced adult life without children and you realize that it doesn't have to suck. Since you must actively choose to conceive each baby, it's like deciding to take a polar bear plunge each time. And at some point you just say "you know what, I've had enough."
That's extremely short-term thinking. The payoff of another child 20 and 40 years down the line is immeasurable.
You're only saying that because you've never lost 5 years of your life to a single baby, let alone the mental committment after that to staying on top of their many needs for the next 20 years. At some point you are sacrificing quality for quantity, and the the world is full of messed up "quantities."
I actually have five children. (Four of whom have IEP's).
So I've invested many years & countless hours in each of my children..
If you want pictures, DM me.
I’m not engaging in a pissing contest. I have a lot of respect for people who can handle five kids well; I have doubts that I could, aside from the physical, mental, and monetary costs involved. I’ve spent my entire life investing in my future and I’m 38 and I’m ready to enjoy some of that future. And there’s no way to know whether the kid(s) I didn’t have would have been a blessing or a curse. Because you really never know until you’ve put in that 20-year investment and seen how things turned out.
Another theory: having kids is stupid and intelligent people do it less.
(I have kids and want more.)
Sort of like supporting Soviet Communism in the 1920's & 1930's.