I have been waiting a long time for this news – thirty years (or thereabouts).
Sometime in the early 1970s what was then the Office of Population Censuses & Surveys began to include, in its new General Household Survey, questions about fertility & contraception directed at all women aged over 16, regardless of marital status. Not entirely without some trepidation – there could have been a How dare they response.
Unwanted, or at least unplanned, pregnancy was a subject of particular policy interest, not least because worries about worldwide population growth were high on the agenda.
One question asked each woman how many children, ideally, they would like to have.
The big shock came when girls born in the 1960s started to be included in the survey. As many as 25% would answer None.
Should population projections take account of this, or should the statisticians assume that they would change their minds later, when the nesting instinct kicked in.
Well now girls born in 1965 have reached the end of their (statistical) childbearing life & in December ONS issued a Statistical Bulletin to tell us what really happened. (For statistical purposes fertility is assumed to end on the day before a woman’s 46th birthday. Of course there have always been births to women beyond that date, but the numbers have always been too small for statisticians to hang around waiting to finalise the figures. Something else which may have to change.)
And 20% - one in five - of women born in 1965 have never had a child.
The ONS Bulletin compares the 1965 cohort with their mothers – for this purpose, women born in 1938, because the average age of women who gave birth in 1965 was 27. Only 10% of their mothers remained childless right up to the age of 46.
The proportion of childless women had doubled in a generation, not because of economic barriers to marriage & household formation, nor because of a shortage of men inthe population.
For me the most startling element in the bulletin however is a chart (Figure 2) which shows – for all cohorts of women born since 1920 – the percentage who reach the age of 30 without having given birth to a child.
This gives dramatic confirmation of something I felt I knew from my own experience & observation: something began to change quite radically for girls born in the years after 1945.
More than 4 out of 5 of their older sisters had had at least one child by the time they were 30, but then began a seemingly inexorably upwards trend in the number who delayed things, so that fully 45% of the 1980 cohort reached the milestone of that 30th birthday unencumbered.
I should like to see the parallel line – the one that shows the number of women who have reached the age of 60 without having had a grandchild to cuddle.
If the average generation length is 20 years then on average women become mothers at 20, grandmothers at 40 & great grandmothers at 60.
If the gap between generations widens to 25 years then the corresponding ages are: mother at 25, grandmother at 50 & great grandmother at 75.
And a generation length of 30 stretches that out to 30, 60 and 90.
So at the age when the post-menopausal grandmother starts to fulfill her evolutionary purpose of helping to bring up her daughter’s children (assuming she is not too far away either geographically or socially), her knowledge of childcare is in some ways more & more out of date & she will also be needed increasingly to help care for her own mother.
Meanwhile her daughter will have no choice but to rejoin the labour market as soon as possible to help produce the goods & services needed by all these non-working dependents in the population.
No wonder we are so concerned about how to provide affordable third party care for children & the elderly.
