Posted on 10/24/2003 4:00:42 PM PDT by yonif
WASHINGTON - Anne Hare and her husband made a momentous decision three years ago: They would not have children. It's not that they don't like kids, she says. They simply don't want to alter the lifestyle they enjoy.
"With kids, especially young kids, infants and toddlers, you really can't do the active stuff we like to do," said Hare, 43, a fitness program coordinator from Gainesville, Ga.
Hare is among 26.7 million women aged 15 to 44 who are childless, a record number, according to new Census Bureau (news - web sites) data from a June 2002 survey. They represent nearly 44 percent of women in that age group.
The number of women 15 to 44 forgoing or putting off motherhood has grown nearly 10 percent since 1990, when roughly 24.3 million were in that class.
Direct comparisons before 1990 are not possible because the bureau didn't track women younger than 18 until then.
The latest numbers reflect the well-established trend of more women going to college and entering the work force, then delaying motherhood or deciding not to have children. More also are choosing adoption, said Martha Farnsworth Riche, a demographer and former head of the Census Bureau.
Hare said she and other childless friends often are incorrectly tagged as "kid-haters."
"It's just difficult to explain to people that we don't hate kids, it's just that we don't want our own," she said.
The percentage of women 40 to 44 — those at the end of their childbearing years — who have not given birth has hovered around 18 percent since 1994, but that's up from 10 percent in 1976.
Non-high school graduates and those with bachelor's degrees were most likely to be childless. Also women with higher incomes had the highest childless rates, in part a reflection of the increased professional options available to them, said David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project, a research group at Rutgers University.
Amy Caizza, study director for the Institute for Women's Policy Research (news - web sites), a Washington think tank, said society's attitudes about childless women also have changed.
"Economic reasons are part of it, but it's also the effect of the women's movement, that you don't have to be a mother to be a complete woman," she said.
Just over half of Asian women were childless, the highest rate among race and ethnic groups. It was 46 percent for non-Hispanic whites, 39 percent for blacks and 36 percent for Hispanics.
Last year about 33 percent of all births were to unmarried women, roughly the same rate since 1998, said Census Bureau demographer Barbara Downs. Blacks were more likely than Hispanics or whites to have out-of-wedlock births.
Roughly 23 percent of the 25.8 million never-married women 15 to 44 were mothers in 2002, about the same rate from 1998 but up from 18 percent of the 20.7 million never-married women in 1990. There was a pronounced increase among never-married women in managerial or professional jobs who were mothers — the percentage has nearly doubled from 9 percent in 1990 to 16 percent in 2002.
Many women in these occupations can earn salaries that enable them to raise a child on their own if they choose, Riche said.
"In earlier days, you had stigma and economic reasons" for these unmarried, professional women not to have kids, she said. "It's much less so now."
Also, about 8 percent of births were to women in unmarried partnerships, the first time the bureau had tracked such a category in the survey.
The report also showed a birth rate of 61 births per 1,000 women 15 to 44 in 2002, down from 67 per 1,000 in 1990. During the same period, it also found the birth rate for women 15 to 19 rose from 40 per 1,000 to 56 per 1,000.
That's far different from National Center for Health Statistics data, which in 2001 showed the birth rate for 15- to 19-year-olds at 45 per 1,000, declining steadily since 1990 from 60 per 1,000.
Government researchers, academics and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, an advocacy group, said they considered NCHS birth data more accurate because it is based on official vital records from hospitals.
The census report was based on a survey of 50,000 homes.
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On the Net:
Census Bureau release: http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/fertility.html
I think not.
Well...not sure how it works now, but I graduated from high school in 1993 and we didn't have those problems. I don't think people watching out for signs of abuse are necessarily "Nazis." I was sexually assaulted as a child and in the mid-1980s, it was simply not something that was discussed. I didn't tell my parents about it until 1996...after I had a nervous breakdown, mostly caused by keeping it bottled up for twelve years. I think I would be a different person now if teachers had sussed out that something was wrong with me after it happened, but that's just me.
Then if you try to homeschool some districts will take you to court. And that's tame compared to the level of intrusion you'll be subjected to if the marriage goes sour and you get divorced. None if this is going away and it's likely to get even worse in the next few years.
To be fair, a lot of people are not qualified to home-school their children and I don't see anything wrong with keeping track of the home-schooled kids to ensure that they don't lag behind their peers. You hear some success stories, but for every home-schooled kid winning the spelling bee, there's gotta be another one who can barely add and subtract because their parents lack basic numeracy skills.
As a matter of fact she does have some other problems. She suffers from anxiety and depression and is on medication for it.
I hope you also left with a new insurance agent. Your insurance agent isn't there to tell you how to live your life -- she's there to fit her product to your needs, not vice versa.
If $70,000 per year isn't enough to live in the area where you live, then it sure as hell isn't enough to buy whatever sh!t she's trying to sell you.
Keep listening to your heart. It sounds to me like you and your family are doing just fine.
Agreed. I have one of my own and she's the center of my universe. She's a teenager now, so I've been preparing myself for the day when I go from being the "greatest dad in the world" to the a$$hole whose "ruining her life." She hasn't started with the whole boy thing yet. I think all of my talk about boyfriends who don't measure up having their heads cut off and stuck on a pike in the front yard might have worked. ;)
Yes, at least the kids send you a poinsettia for Christmas before they ship you off to the home.
A lot of that depends on the person and not on whether they do or do not have children. I don't have kids and I hate seeing yet another generation being saddled with Social Security and other government claptrap. I also know parents and grandparents who don't think about that at all.
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