Trends in Years Spent as Mothers of Young Children: The Role of Completed Fertility, Birth Spacing, and Multiple Partner Fertility

Christine R. Schwartz (), Catherine Doren () and Anita Li ()
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Christine R. Schwartz: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Sociology
Catherine Doren: Princeton University, Office of Population Research
Anita Li: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Sociology

Chapter Chapter 10 in Analyzing Contemporary Fertility, 2020, pp 237-256 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The number of years women spend as mothers of young children likely has implications for women’s lifetime wages, earnings, and time use. Much prior research has pointed to widening education differences in a wide array of family patterns, but none has examined trends in the number of years women spend as mothers of young children. We use retrospective fertility data from the 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation to show how changes in women’s completed fertility and birth spacing produce trends in years women spend as mothers of children under age six from 1967 to 2017. Despite remarkably parallel declines in completed fertility, growing educational differences in birth spacing produced educational divergence in years spent as mothers of young children. Particularly striking is the finding that increases in birth spacing reversed declines in years spent as mothers for women with less than a high school degree such that they spent more years with young children in the 2010s than in the late 1960s. The increasing prevalence of multiple partner fertility explains some but not all of these trends.

Date: 2020
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ssdmcp:978-3-030-48519-1_10

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-48519-1_10

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