The Pew Research Center, in a report on American motherhood released this month, reported that 35% of people say that their first child “just happened.”

I think this is fascinating in light of the fact that many Americans are generally committed to the idea that we control our fertility.  Safe(r) sex and family planning campaigns tell us that, if we make the proper choices, then we will (very probably) not have an unplanned pregnancy.  They tend to downplay the fact that even the most effective methods of pregnancy prevention are not foolproof.  Let’s call this the ideology of near-perfect control of reproduction.

In fact, about half of all births occur as a result of an unplanned pregnancy.  So the fact that 1/3rd of parents say their first child “just happened” may actually be an under count.  An ideology of near-perfect control of reproduction, however, makes it seem really surprising that so many parents would choose that response.

Then again… maybe the ideology of near-perfect control of reproduction is a luxury afforded mostly to privileged classes.  The Pew report also offered data on who said that their first child “just happened”:

Notice that people with less education and lower incomes were more likely to have their first child by “accident” than people with more education and higher incomes.  They were also more likely to have their first child as a teenager.  These are the groups that we might expect, on average, to have less knowledge about birth control and less access to (especially more effective forms of) birth control.  Given that our society is class segregated, members of these groups may also be surrounded by other people who “just happened” to have kids.  The ideology of near-perfect control of reproduction, then, may not be as strong.  This may also contribute to a willingness to admit that it “just happened,” instead of re-fashioning the introduction of parenting as a fully conscious choice.

Hat tip to Philip Cohen at Family Inequality.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Sebastian sent in this ad for a used car website that uses the stereotype of the wise Japanese “sensei”:

We’ve got all the elements: the wise older man in a robe, stylized letters similar to what Margaret Cho describes as “feng shui Hong Kong fooey font,” the broken English, the reference to nature (“clean as pebble from stream”).

Related posts: Asian enlightenment used to sell food, and more food.

This 1937 ad for United Airlines boasts a “miracle” improvement in air travel in just 10 years. In 1927, when commercial flight was initiated, it took 33 hours and 14 stops to fly from coast to coast. By 1937, one could fly the same distance in just 15 and 1/3 hours! With only three stops!

The ad certainly puts into perspective my own frustration at what a time-suck air travel can be.

Source: Vintage Ads.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Lisa recently discussed the trend of women having children at older ages. The Pew Research Center also just released data on women who do not have children lessfree (a commenter pointed out that “childless” implies a lack, whereas “childfree” doesn’t; others say “child-free” is also value-laden; “childless” is the word used in the report). They defined “childless” as women aged 40-44 who have no children; importantly, women who have adopted but never given birth themselves are also categorized as without children, which I find rather problematic. I can see why you might want info on both situations, but to define adoptive mothers as not having children? That’s weird. Also, they don’t report info for men.

From the report:

One in five women aged 40 to 44 reported that they’ve never had children. Meanwhile, just 41 percent of Americans say having children is necessary to a good marriage, compared to 65 percent in 1990.

The number has been increasing over time, with slightly short-term dips here and there:

Not having children is more common as education increases, though interestingly, the number of women without kids who have a Master’s or higher degrees is actually lower than in the early ’90s:

Of course, you could interpret the educational pattern a couple of ways. Perhaps achieving advanced degrees requires women who would have liked to have children to choose between career advancement and family life. Or maybe having an advanced degree makes them less attractive to potential partners, or unwilling to accept the partners available to them, so they have to decide whether to be single parents. But of course, it could also be that women who pursue advanced degrees are women who were less interested in having children to begin with. I’m sure there are other explanations and that it’s likely to be a combination of all these factors, and I’m sure somewhere there is data available. Let me know if you’ve got a good link.

But I’m stumped about the decrease in the number of highly-educated women without children between the early ’90s and now. Any thoughts on what might have caused that?

Anyway, moving on…

The increase in women without children holds for all racial/ethnic groups (and, as usual, data on Native Americans wasn’t included; sorry):

Probably not surprisingly, women aged 40-44 who never married are much more likely to be without children than are married women, though as we see, the percentage has gone down, indicating more never-married single mothers:

From that perspective, it appears that marriage and childbearing are tightly linked–only a small proportion of women who have been married at some point have no children.

But if we break down the data a bit, we see that of women aged 40-44 without children, 60% were married at least once:

So while for the U.S. population as a whole, getting married generally indicates children will appear at some point, most women who forgo childbearing do marry at least once, showing that this isn’t just a phenomenon of single women.

Where did I learn about this report? From the website Shit My Kids Ruined, which I read with morbid fascination.

Rose saw the ad below in a free UK parenting magazine.  She thought it was a great example of how an ad sometimes pays “lip service to being inclusive and PC, while [including] numerous elements [that] make it obvious that it isn’t what they really intend.”

So, yes, the ad specifies that the event is for “mums, dads and carers” and it’s nice that they went that far to include them.  But the event is clearly for mothers or women carers and their girl children (and, more specifically, the transfer of feminine training from mother to daughter).  The color of the ad, the feminine shoes with bows, the title (“Mummy Mornings”), and the feminized activities (including “beauty sessions” and the chance to be “spoilt”) are all elements that mark this as for-girls-only.

Is it better to include dads as an afterthought?  Or should we just acknowledge that we’re organizing parent/child activities around mothers (and in this case, daughters)?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

These Chilean ads for menstrual pain medication, sent in by Mia A., turn women into symbols of violent aggression: fighters, literally, but also men of color.  They simultaneously affirm, then, the association of violence with both masculinity and non-white skin and the de-association of women with those characteristics.  The message is that men of color are appropriately violent, while women are not.

(source)

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Dimitriy T.M. let us know about the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey website, which has lots of fascinating information. The ATUS data for 2009 was just released but they don’t have charts available yet, so I’m presenting data from 2008 here.

This shows daily time spent in various activities for women who are married and have children under 6 living in the home, by their employment status:

They didn’t provide a similar breakdown for married men, oddly.

Hours spent daily on household chores, by sex (but not broken down by employment status):

The difference in hours spent on household activities is interesting, but since it’s not broken down by employment, and women are less likely to be employed full-time than men, it doesn’t really tell us to what degree this is women doing a “second shift” vs. household management as their primary activity, so that’s sort of annoying.

Volunteer activity by sex and age (notice that the columns represent the average daily % of the population who volunteered, not the number of hours they spent volunteering, and the data is an average for 2004-2008):

This isn’t surprising, given that social scientists have generally found that women do more volunteer work, more regularly, than men (again, I’d like to see this broken down by employment status).

It’s also interesting that men and women who volunteer tend to do different types of activities. As this graph shows, it mimics the indoor/outdoor household chores pattern we see in family life. Women are more likely to do food preparation, while men are more likely to do maintenance. Also, men seem somewhat more likely to have leadership positions or to attend skills-building activities, while women do organizational stuff:

For both men and women, volunteering is most common for those with school-aged children in the household, indicating that a lot of volunteering is probably for child-centered organizations such as sports teams and PTA meetings:

I was somewhat surprised by the relationship between volunteering and educational level. The percent of people who volunteer goes up with more education, but the hours spent volunteering per day goes down:

Though the daily difference isn’t huge (just a half hour less for those with a 4-year college degree and those with less than a high school degree), over the course of a month or year it would certainly add up.

If you go through the raw data files, I’m sure there are all types of interesting relationships that give more detailed information about sex, employment status, and time usage. A fun way to waste time if you ever need a procrastination tool.

A Pew Research Center report on the changing demographics of American motherhood (discovered thanks to a tip by Michael Kimmel) shows that there has been a significant rise in childbearing among women at the later end of their childbearing years.

Not quite twice as many U.S. women over 35 gave birth in 2008 compared to 1990 (while we see the opposite trend for teen births):

The share of all births that were to women over 35 also increased from 9% to 14%:

A look at the birth rates across women from 15 to 44 shows that fewer women between 15 and 29 are giving birth, but the numbers are up for all women 30 and over.

The data broken down by race also suggests that it is white and Asian women who are driving this trend:

For more from this report, see our post on race trends in motherhood.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.