On Young Moms

For the first time in almost four decades, the age of first-time mothers has fallen, to 25.0 years. It's too early to know whether that's a trend reversal or a blip, but unless there's a qualitative component to these numbers in addition to the quantitative component, I am going to go ahead and call this out as wild speculation:

But some experts also see a shift in attitudes. More young women today just assume they'll have both a career and a family, and on their own timetable, says Stephanie Coontz, director of research for the Council on Contemporary Families. Young women feel less compelled to spend a decade proving themselves on the job before kids, she says.

Are women really opting to have children at a younger age because they think their childbearing choices won't have any effect on their careers? Or because they expect that their reproductive choices might affect their career, but think having kids younger will have less of an effect than doing so later? Or because if you're damned if you do and damned if you don't you might as well do what you want when you want it? Or is there some other reason?

There are at least two reasons Coontz's theory smells like bullshit. First, it ignores that sizable chunk of womandom for whom their job is not a "career" as she seems to be thinking of it--service employees, retail worker, skilled and unskilled laborers of various sorts. Decisions about whether and when to have kids has an economic aspect for anyone, but not every woman does the kind of work where proving yourself on the job over the course of a decade is really a concern. These numbers don't just include professional women with a college degree, and it's not only kind of insulting to imply that they do (just because the Wall Street Journal doesn't tend to concern itself with Those Sorts Of People doesn't mean they don't exist), but it introduces a bias into how these numbers are talked about.

Second, even if we were talking only about college-educated professional women it could very well be that, instead of going all fiddledeedee, I'll think about the impact on my career tomorrow! as the article implies, the choice to have kids earlier rather than later may actually be a deliberate attempt to minimize the extent of the professional fallout. The greatest downward shift in ages was in the 20-25 year old cohort. These are women who are more likely to still be in undergrad or graduate/professional school or to be in the first couple years of their careers, when a resume gap is less likely to even be noticed, much less seen by a potential employer as a cause for concern. When I interview law students, I look at their grades and extracurricular or summertime activities. I don't think it's ever occurred to me to notice whether there's a semester or year gap where a student took time off. If they were enrolled in school part time as taking a 1x/week class or working on a thesis I don't think such a gap would even show up. Taking that sort of ad hoc maternity leave wouldn't even be a blip on the radar. Hell, I realized at the time that if I'd had a stable long-term relationship at that time of my life, those years would have been much more conducive to having kids than now. I had more flexibility in my schedule, heavily subsidized health care through the plan I was required to carry as a student, and it could have been all but invisible to future employers when they were scrutinizing my resume. Now maybe that theory is bunk as well, but the point is we just don't know, and I don't think it's useful to suggest that a one-year statistical reversal is due to the fact that women are becoming more sanguine about their work lives, or that their work lives themselves have become oh-so accommodating.

Finally, I think it's worth noting that this whole conversation assumes women actively choose to time their reproductive lives. Not much to say about that, just that it's nice when anyone in the media acknolwedges, even tacitly, that birth control is both normal and useful.