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Statista Evaluation of How It Supports My Claim

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Statista Evaluation of How It Supports My Claim

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1. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the average ideal amount of children among women was 3.5 kids. Ever since 1980 that number has decreased to around 2.5 kids and has remained as such ever since. A shift in culture shows a decrease in women's desire to have kids.

2. The Gallup survey, a survey that has been going on since the 1930s, and the GSS survey added in an option for "as many as you want" when asking women how many kids they want. Increasingly, more and more women answered the survey with "as many as you want". Because this value is not numerical and tells us nothing about how many kids women want, we can assume that women simply are unsure about how many kids they want. Due to this uncertainty and lack of a goal for how many kids they want, there is a clear lack of incentive to have kids. Because women don't know what they want, they won't know if they want kids or not, diminishing the chances of them having kids as well as their desire to have kids. To put it in perspective, let's say you are offered to invest 100 dollars into a company you barely know anything about and are told that it's a good investment by certain friends and family, but told the opposite by other friends and family. You probably wouldn't want to invest money into that company because it's too high of a risk. This is how it is for women who don't know how many kids they want, nor if they even want kids.

3. Overall, men have a higher desire to have children than women do, usually because women have to bear the child and give birth to it.

4. Women now have longer work hours and lower wages, thus they cannot support a family as well. In a post-nuclear family world, women have more responsibilities, and thus less time to raise a child.

5. The costs to raise a child have increased over time. Most women cannot afford these costs and can only sustain supporting themselves. Some women are even unable to support themselves and need outside help to maintain themselves.

6. Due to increased stress, having to work harder to sustain their lives, and so on, women have decreased their expectations for how many kids they will have as they believe it to be more reasonable to have fewer kids and to be easier on their life.

7. The current status quo around having kids is to have less of them. Increasingly, women are given incentives to have fewer or no kids. This is evident in the fact that women educated at the college level are less likely to desire or have kids because the more they understand the downsides to it, the less they want to have kids. As women have a better understanding of the struggles of bearing a child, their desire to have those kids decreases.

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Statista:
80% of women have a kid by ages 35 to 39. This supports the claim that women will prefer to have kids before they get older.  From ages 35 to 39 to ages 40 to 44, the amount of childless women only decreases by 5%, supporting the idea that women are less likely to have kids as they get older.

Cornell Chronicle:
This article talks about how women will want a kid at younger ages due to a lack of purpose in their life. Being a mother gives them purpose. If this is true in the people who I collect data from, more of the data will be skewed to women wanting kids at a younger age.

Institute For Family Studies:
As women have more and more responsibilities in the modern-day, they have less time and desire to have kids, supporting my claim that women will want fewer kids overall than men. People tend to base how many kids they want on what people tell them is a good amount and what is socially considered normal. In the modern-day, it is considered better to have fewer kids so as to avoid the issues that come with bearing a child and monetary problems.

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Statista:
Less than half of women have kids at ages 25 to 29, countering my claim that girls will prefer to have kids at younger ages. At ages 30 to 34, one-third of women are still childless, a marginal amount. At ages 35 to 39, this drops to one-fifth of kids. This means that a decent amount of women are having kids at later ages, countering my claim.

Cornell Chronicle:
Women who live in poor living conditions are more likely to have kids at a younger age. Due to the fact that most of the women at my school are more likely to be richer than poor, more women will prefer to have kids at later ages.

Institute For Family Studies:
Women want more kids, but men want fewer kids. People face economic problems in their households, making them want to have fewer kids. A decrease in marriage rates results in fewer kids being born, but not because women want it this way.

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I have always had an interest in why people do the things they do, why they make the decisions they make, and so on and so forth. One of the biggest decisions a person will make is deciding to have a kid. So I decided to research "How many kids do people want?" and ask the students of my grade. I hope to learn more about the decision-making process of how teenagers in my school decide why they want a certain amount of kids and under what circumstances. I will find this out through a survey. I believe that women will want to have fewer kids than men overall due to the fact that they have to actually bare the child as well as they will be more likely to want to adopt. Furthermore, I would guess that women would prefer to have kids at younger ages due to the fact that they mature faster and bearing a child is harder as you grow older.

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Percentage of childless women in the United States in 2018, by age - Statista

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Percentage of childless women in the United States in 2018, by age - Statista

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https://www.statista.com/statistics/241535/percentage-of-childless-women-in-the-us-by-age/

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In 2018, 96.9 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 19 years old in the United States were childless -- the most out of any age group. In the same year, 15 percent of women between the ages of 40 and 44 years old were childless.
Demographics of women without children
As of 2018, a little less than half of all women in the U.S. were childless. About 63.5 percent of women without children did not have a high school degree, which is in line with the largest percentage of childless women being between the ages of 15 and 19. Additionally, about 47.6 percent of Asian women in the United States did not have any children, more than the national average.
Births in the U.S.
Asian women in the United States had the lowest fertility rate per 1,000 women, while Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women had the highest fertility rate. The vast majority of all births in the U.S. were to women between the ages of 20 and 39, but it is worth noting that births in the United States have been declining over the past few decades.

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Percentage of childless women, by age U.S. 2018 | Statista

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In 2018, 96.9 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 19 years old in the United States were childless -- the most out of any age group. In the same year, 15 percent of women between the ages of 40 and 44 years old were childless.

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Most teens get pregnant on purpose because other life goals seem out of reach, says Cornell researcher - Cornell

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Most teens get pregnant on purpose because other life goals seem out of reach, says Cornell researcher - Cornell

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https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/06/expert-andrea-parrot-calls-new-multi-dimensional-approach

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ITHACA, N.Y. -- "Many teenage pregnancies aren't accidental but intentional because of girls who see no life goals other than being a mother as realistically within their reach," says Andrea Parrot, Ph.D., a Cornell University women's health and human sexuality expert.

That's a major reason why most current sex and pregnancy prevention education efforts "are ineffective at preventing teenage pregnancy and the U.S. has an outrageous teen pregnancy rate -- the highest in the industrialized world," said Parrot, associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management in Cornell's College of Human Ecology.

In the recent Cornell Cooperative Extension teleconference Women's Health Across the Generations, which was downlinked to 15 sites across New York state in February, Parrot advocated wider use of long-term, multi-dimensional, community-based programs that have proven successful because they offer hope for a brighter future and the means to achieve life goals other than motherhood.

"Such programs are undoubtedly expensive. However, providing the program for a girl for several years will cost less than the social welfare, medical and lost income costs for a teen mother in the first year she has the baby," Parrot pointed out.

Effectively preventing teen pregnancies would save the billions of dollars society pays to support a teen mother, her children and even her grandchildren, often for a lifetime. It also would break the cycle related to psychopathologies in our culture, including drug and alcohol abuse, fetal alcohol syndrome, drug-induced birth defects, dropping out of school, crime, domestic violence and poverty.

"As a society, we keep on paying and paying when our teens become mothers," said Parrot, who has been working in the area of teen sexuality for 20 years and is the co-author of the 1979 manual Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention: A Team Approach.

"Too many teenage girls see themselves as having nothing to strive for -- they can't see graduating from high school because they have few role models to follow, their teachers give them little encouragement about their abilities, their families are chaotic and their friends are on drugs. Parenting looks like the best thing going, many girls think, because babies provide an immediate source of unconditional love," Parrot said.

Researchers now know that certain factors predispose girls to choose early motherhood over other goals. These include poverty, school failure, a mother or sister who was a teen mother and living in a dangerous neighborhood, Parrot said.

"We also know that prevention programs based on promoting abstinence don't reduce adolescent sex and that school-based clinics, sex education and contraceptive service programs have little impact on teen sexual activity. The adolescent pregnancy rate continues to rise in every state," she added.

Yet, some programs effectively counter these trends. One of the most successful programs was developed by Dr. Michael Carrera of the National Adolescent Sexuality Training Center for the Children's Aid Society in New York City. Whereas the city's teen pregnancy rate is 14 percent, the rate for the high-risk girls in the program, which has been replicated in 27 sites around the country, has dropped to 4 percent.

These programs help girls acquire skills to achieve life goals other than motherhood. Carrera's program, for example, includes guaranteed college admission, employment, personal savings plan and medical services. In addition, the program focuses on teaching skills and values related to lifetime sports, self-expression and family life and provides sex education and counseling services.

To be most effective, programs must target high-risk girls early (before age 10) and help strengthen their families and provide educational enrichment and economic opportunities.

"If we keep doing what we've been doing regarding sex education and pregnancy prevention, we will continue to get what we've got: a tremendous waste of time, money, energy, human potential and an outrageous teen pregnancy rate that's associated with many ills of today's society," Parrot concluded. "Instead, we have to spend the money up front and provide girls early with the support and skills they need to have a sense of control over their lives and the means to make meaningful choices."

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Most teens get pregnant on purpose because other life goals seem out of reach, says Cornell researcher | Cornell Chronicle

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“Many teenage pregnancies aren’t accidental but intentional because of girls who see no life goals other than being a mother as realistically within their reach,” says Andrea Parrot, Ph.D., a Cornell University women’s health and human sexuality expert.

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How Many Kids Do Women Want? - Institute for Family Studies

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How Many Kids Do Women Want? - Institute for Family Studies

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https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-many-kids-do-women-want