1. Making Babies: Choosing to have Children… …or not

2. Choosing to have Children
Pronatalist Bias: having children is taken for granted, while not having children needs to be justified
Why wouldn’t you have children?

3. Choosing not to have Children
Structural Antinatalism (Friedan):
American society is insufficiently supportive of having children *

4. Why have Children: the Value of Children Perspective
Cultural shift from children as economic asset to emotional investment- “a child to love” *

5. Social Capital Perspective
The anticipated social benefits as motivation *

6. ADVANTAGES OF CHILDREN: Hoffman
1. AFFECTION / PRIMARY GROUP TIES (63%)
2. FUN / STIMULATION (58%)
3. EXPANSION OF SELF (34%)
4. ADULT STATUS (21%)

7. DISADVANTAGES OF HAVING CHILDREN
1. LOSS OF FREEDOM (51%)
2. FINANCIAL COSTS (42%)
3. OPPORTUNITY COSTS
• economic • emotional
4. TENSION in RELATIONSHIP

8. Effects of having Children on Marriage (Picker)
33 to 50% experience distress after first child as high as couples in counseling
WHY?
Child Care pushes couples into traditional gender roles--Women take on majority of work

9. Solutions to Negative effect of children (Gottman)
Couples remain happy when…
Husband admires his wife
Keeps romance alive
Understand wife’s inner life
Husband’s behavior most influential in marital satisfaction

10. Postponing Parenthood * 2-sided coin… One Child Families
NEW TRENDS
Remaining Child Free
* reasons why…
Postponing Parenthood
* 2-sided coin…
One Child Families
* the good and bad…

11. PREMARITAL PREGNANCIES
• 1940, unwed birthrate less than 5% of total births
• 2005, unwed birthrate 37%
of total births

12. Older Single Mothers 1980 to 1998, Unwed birthrates for women
Women ages increased by more than 90%

13. Older Single Mothers
White women’s rate increased by 128% while the increase was only 20% among the same age-group of black women

14. Teenage Pregnancies • unwed birth rate among teens decreasing
• % of all births
• 2000, 79% of teenage births occurred outside of marriage
Highest rates of teen pregnancy was in 1950