Why Women Delay Having Children?

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"Studies have suggested that over recent decades, UK women have postponed motherhood largely because they want to go onto college or university to gain qualifications or fulfil educational aspirations before starting a family. 

New research from the University of Oxford in the UK and the Universities of Groningen and Wageningen in the Netherlands sheds new light on this theory, however, showing that the role of education is much smaller in delaying motherhood than previously believed. The researchers found that in the UK, a woman's family background was the major factor rather than education. The full findings are published in the journal, Demography.

The average age of first-time mothers increased by as many as four to five years at the end of the 20th century throughout Europe and the United States, as compared with the end of the Second World War. Educational attainment for women also increased over the same period, says the paper. The researchers used nationally representative data from the Office of National Statistics for cohorts of women born in the UK between 1944 and 1967 to track patterns of educational enrolment to see how they influence reproductive behaviour. 

The researchers also compared the fertility histories of more than 2,700 female twins from the largest adult twin register in the United Kingdom (set up in 1992), which acts as a controlled trial because this isolates the effects of different levels of education between siblings in pairs of twins who share so many other characteristics.

Significantly, their model calculates that for every extra year of educational enrolment after the age of 12, a woman delayed motherhood by an average of six months. However, strikingly, they also find that the main influence on whether a woman postpones having children is largely associated with her family background. The paper concludes that family environment, a combination of a woman's social, economic and genetic factors, is significant, with education alone contributing to only 1.5 months of the total six-month delay..."

Learn more: 

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170109092622.htm