Planning No Family, Now or Ever
By Diane CrispellOctober 1993
Children are so fashionable these days that nonparents are ignored. In August, a slew of breathless reports focused on the rising proportion of unmarried women who are having babies. The articles were based on a new study by the Census Bureau, but they were not really news. The real changes have been happening among women who don't have children.
The stereotype of a nonmother--an unmarried career women--is often true. Forty percent of childless women aged 35 to 44 have never been married, compared with less than 4 percent of mothers their age. Almost half (46 percent) of childless women in early middle age have college degrees, compared with 31 percent of mothers. Nonmothers aged 35 to 44 are also more likely than mothers to be in the labor force (87 percent versus 75 percent). And 36 percent of employed nonmothers are in professional or managerial jobs, compared with 21 percent of employed mothers.
Few women plan to stay childless all their lives. Among childless married women aged 30 to 34, for example, 57 percent plan to have a baby in the future. Not all will succeed. The Census Bureau estimates that 7 to 24 percent of women aged 18 to 24 will never have children, as well as 13 to 15 percent of those aged 35 to 39.
Which estimate for 18-to-24-year-olds is likely to be accurate? In 1982, 10 to 17 percent of women aged 25 to 29 were expected to remain childless. Ten years later, 19 percent of these women still had no children. Some still expect to have babies. A few will, reducing this group's ultimate rate of childlessness to about 15 percent. If the pattern holds for today's 18-to-24-year-olds, their ultimate childless rate may fall slightly below the bureau's estimate of 24 percent.
There are three kinds of childless people-those who have no children yet, those who never will, and those whose kids have grown and gone. The day-to-day lives of the permanently childless may resemble those of pre- and post-parents, but their perspectives are very different. Non-parents never have to budget for diapers or college educations. They can make decisions about where to live without worrying about the quality of local schools or which pediatricians offer weekend hours. They can even experience parenthood vicariously through nieces, nephews, and friends' children--but only if they choose to.