Women waiting longer to hear patter of little feet; more opting for no kids

Women are waiting longer to have children, and more women than ever are choosing not to have children at all, according to a new Census Bureau report.

Twenty percent of women ages 40 to 44 have no children, double the level of 30 years ago, the report said; and women in that age bracket who do have children have fewer than ever — an average of 1.9 children, compared with the median of 3.1 children in 1976.

"A lot of women are not having any children," said Jane Lawler Dye, a Census Bureau researcher who did the report, which looked at women of childbearing age in 2006. "It used to be sort of expected that there was a phase of life where you had children, and a lot of women aren't doing that now."

Women with advanced degrees are more likely to be childless, the study found. Of women 40 to 44 with graduate or professional degrees, 27 percent are childless, compared with 18 percent of women who did not continue their education beyond high school, the data show.

The numbers are consistent with a 2006 report Dye issued on the same subject. Dye said the data show that women of the baby-boom generation are continuing to transform families in the United States.

Hispanic women are the only group bucking the trends found in the study, averaging 2.3 children each by their 40s. The number of children a Hispanic woman has decreases sharply, however, depending on how many generations her family have lived in the United States, the data show.

One in five new mothers in 2006 were foreign-born, the study found.

Of all the women who had children in 2006, nearly 60 percent worked, with the highest numbers of working mothers in the Midwest. That may be explained by another census study, which found that, for children under 5, the Midwest has more child care available than any other region. Researchers said the numbers seemed to be consistent with other demographic trends, including the rising age of women marrying and having children for the first time, as well as women with more education having fewer children later in life.

"Clearly women have competing alternatives for the use of their time, with the labor market and employment being one, and delayed marriage, which has been another trend," said Suzanne Bianchi, chairwoman of the sociology department at the University of Maryland. "The interesting question is, has it stopped? Is this it, or will we see even higher rates of childlessness among future generations?"