Study: Women in US waiting longer for children, more children born to unwed mothers

May 13, 2010 by Shawn Douglas
Filed under: News, Pregnancy

A new research study conducted by Pew has found that women are waiting longer for children and are increasingly likely to be unwed when they have them.

New research suggests continued changes in U.S. approaches and perceptions to pregnancy.

The Pew Research Center combined census and government health statistics with a survey of 1,003 adults (of which 770 were parents) about their attitudes and perceptions of pregnancy in the U.S. and found significant changes in the demographic.

Looking at the statistics, Pew found that the number of women who gave birth after the age of 35 jumped from 368,000 in 1990 to 603,000 in 2008, with nearly one in seven babies being born to them in 2008.

Pew contrasted that increase with a decrease in teen pregnancy numbers. They found that in 1990, the number of births to women under the age of 20 was 533,000. In 2008, that number had fallen to 441,000.

With this shift rose the average age a woman waits to have her first child. In 1990, the average age for a first child was 24; it was 25 in 2008.

“The demography of motherhood in the United States has shifted strikingly in the past two decades,” said Pew in its report.

Suzanne Bianchi, a sociologist at UCLA, agreed that the findings represent a clear change.

“It’s clear that young adult transitions are being postponed,” Bianchi told The Washington Post. “Children born to highly educated mothers increasingly are born later in life. The mothers are usually married, and they have a much higher chance of raising children in a stable marriage that lasts through a child’s childhood.”

But Pew noted that the number of women waiting to have children until married has actually decreased significantly in the U.S.

“Another notable change during this period was the rise in births to unmarried women … a record 41 percent of births in the United States were to unmarried women, up from 28 percent in 1990,” the Pew authors noted.

Pew’s survey results seemed to back up the finding. When asked, 79 percent of respondents said that they knew an unmarried woman who had at least one child, while 68 percent said that knew an unmarried man in the same situation.

The results of the study can be found on Pew’s Web site.