Birth postponement

Birth postponement is defined as an increase in the age at which women give birth to their first child, is now a widespread, and indeed near universal, phenomenon across the OECD countries. In Western, Northern, and Southern Europe, first-time mothers are on average 26 to 29 years old, up from 23 to 25 years at the start of the 1970s. In a number of European countries (Spain), the mean age of women at first childbirth has now even crossed the 30 year threshold.

This process is not restricted to Europe. Asia, Japan and the United States are all seeing average age at first birth on the rise, and increasingly the process is spreading to countries in the developing world like China, Turkey and Iran.

Birth Postponement And Low Fertility
Having children later was not exceptional in the past, when families were larger and women often continued bearing children until the end of their reproductive age. What is so radical about this recent transformation is that it is the age at which women give birth to their first child which is becoming comparatively high, leaving an ever more constricted window of biological opportunity for second and subsequent children should they be desired. Unsurprisingly high first birth ages, and rapid rates of birth postponement are associated with the arrival of low, and lowest-low fertility.

This association has now become especially clear since the postponement of first births in a number of  countries has now continued unabated for more than three decades, and has become one of the most prominent characteristics of fertility patterns in developed societies. A variety of authors (in particular Lesthaeghe) have argued that fertility postponement constitutes the ‘hallmark’ of what has become known as the second demographic transition. Others have proposed that the postponement process itself constitutes a separate 'third transition'(Kohler, Billari, and Ortega). On this latter view modern developed societies exhibit a kind of dual fertility regime, with the majority of births being concentrated either among very young or increasingly older mothers. This is sometimes known as the 'rectangularisation' of fertility patterns.

A focus on the timing of first birth is important for understanding the overall trends towards later childbearing. While second and higher-order births are also being postponed, such posponement is mostly a consequence of first birth postponement rather than a manifestation of change in birth intervals. It is worth stressing that the determinants of delayed parenthood are frequently identical with the determinants of low fertility and non-parenthood.

Explanations For Birth Postponement
A variety of explanations have been offered as to why young people postpone parenthood.

Increase In Educational Levels
In the first case such delay is normally associated with increasing levels of education. Post-industrial economies exhibit an ever-increasing demand for highly educated and flexible workers. For the individual, the pursuit of higher education constitutes the principal pathway for finding a stable job, securing a higher salary, and for increasing career prospects generally. As a result most young people remain enrolled in some form of education well into early adulthood. The anticipated number of years post compulsory education is now as high as 8.5 years in France, and up to half of all those in the 20-24 age group (and even between 50 and 55% in Denmark, Finland, and France) are enrolled in full-time or part-time studies. Women have especially benefited from this development and now form more than half of the graduate and postgraduate students in a majority of European countries. Such educational expansion evidently has a direct implication for fertility trends.

Employment And Motherhood
A second explanation centres around the potential conflict which young women face between employment and motherhood. This conflict which is fuelled by rapidly increasing educational level and labor force participation among women, constitutes one of the most widely debated issues in contemporary fertility research. Traditionally, employment and motherhood were seen as incompatible roles, and Gary Becker’s argument that the increasing gender equality which gives rise to greater earning power for women increases both their labor force participation and the opportunity costs of childbearing, consequently reducing the demand for children. Recent studies, however, have increasingly found that the relationship between labor force participation and fertility is not a straightforward one and may be filtered through a number of additional factors. Looked at dynamically it is not hard to argue that compatibility between family life and labor force participation, as impacted by societal differences, cohort membership, age, and education all serve to modify this relationship.

Insecurity
As much as labor force participation per-se, security of employment is thought to be important, and the widespread presence of part-time and temporary employment at the younger ages are thought to persuade many to delay. This however is not an unequivocal view, since the availability of part-time employment may be thought to act in a pro-natal direction, making motherhood and employment continuity possible, and it may be rather the employment stability of the father which is the key factor.

Clearly both individual and societal conditions associated with uncertainty have a strong impact on fertility decisions. Mills and Blossfeld distinguish between (1) economic uncertainty, related to the “economic precariousness of an individual’s employment and educational enrolment circumstances,” (2) temporal uncertainty, and (3) employment relationship uncertainty, reflecting the type and precariousness of the employment contract.

In the Mills-Blossfeld framework, being unemployed leads to a high level of an individual’s economic uncertainty, whereas rising unemployment rates could lead to higher temporal uncertainty. Young adults are increasingly susceptible to all forms of uncertainty, especially with regards to their employment situation, which has a disproportionate impact on disadvantaged—especially less educated—social groups. In addition, the rapid pace of change, the unpredictability of social and economic developments, and the overflow of information create uncertainty about possible behavioural outcomes as well as about the probability of these outcomes, and about the amount of information to be collected for a particular decision. Unsurprisingly these authors suggest that the rapid rise of globalisation has been a key factor associated with increasing the levels of each of the these three types of uncertainty.