Purple Women & Friends: Do We Count?

Purple Women & Friends: Do We Count?

The childfree blog takes on US Census numbers - why aren't we being counted? Certainly the effect that an individual has, or plans to have, on future census numbers is relevant. They propose new categories:

Family Status:
Non-parent (not planning to have children)
Step-parent
Foster parent
Parent
Undecided about children.

The census asks two questions to examine childlessness:

(1) How many children have you ever had and
(2) What is the date of birth of your last child?

and reports the results in its studies of Female Fertility. Interestingly, although the term childfree does not appear on the page itself, the page's listing in Google results is termed "US Bureau of Census Childfree Statistics"

We also can discern trends from the statistics of childless women, and extrapolate that, absent any reason to believe infertility is growing significantly, more people are opting out of parenthood:

Record Number of childless women: the Census Bureau says a record 26.7 million women of childbearing age had no children in 2002, a 10% increase over 1990

That number represents nearly 44% of women ages 15 to 44. The latest numbers reflect the trend of more women going to college and entering the workforce, then delaying motherhood or deciding not to have children. Just over half of women of Asian descent were childless, the highest rate among racial and ethnic groups. "Economic reasons are part of it," says Amy Caizza of the Institute for Women's Policy Research. "But it's also the effect of the women's movement; you don't have to be a mother to be a complete woman."

But questionston still remains whether a more detailed look at the why is the providence of the Census. Differentiating between the voluntary and involutary childless would certainly be beneficial to demographers, as well as to medicine. The questions proposed by Purple Women would allow us to differentiate between the infertile, the childfree, and those in that age range who will have children in the future. Currently, we can imagine that most of the women in the 40-44 age range will remain childless (19.3% as of 2004). However, we cannot differentiate between the countless 15, 20 and 25 years old respondents who will go on to have children, and those who will remain childless. Therefore, we have no basis to discern whether the trends from survey to survey indicate an increase in childlessness in those age brackets or simply an increase in the number of women postponing parenting.

I, for one, would be very happy to see just any statistical study that gave us an idea of the rate of voluntary childlessness in America. Absent that small step, I'm not confident the larger one is imminent.