Unburdened Under 30: Why Should You Wait to Have Children?

To have a kid, or not to have a kid — that is the question. And it’s a tough one.

After all, children are messy and take up a huge amount of your time, in addition to which they’re basically tiny black holes that eat money. Don’t believe us? We have a calculator that might convince you otherwise.

Despite this, people can’t seem to get enough of those little bundles of joy, and every other week it seems like there’s a new think piece about how having a baby changed someone’s life, made them realize the world was beautiful and worth living in, or some other sappy nonsense like that. The fact is that children can be really great when you’re ready for them, when you’ve taken the time to open up your lives (and wallets) to the experience of having them.

But that hasn’t stopped young people from having fewer and fewer children, a fact that seems utterly baffling to anyone who hasn’t heard about how cool birth control is. The reasons for choosing to not have a child are legion, but for many, the biggest reason is that they’re looking to reach some kind of stability — for those who reach it, the benefits can be tremendous. In fact, according to this Washington Post article, women in their 30s (who are most likely to have higher levels of financial stability) are experiencing a booming birth rate.

That got us wondering — what sort of effect did having a child early in life have on a woman’s career? And what sort of jobs or industries were women who’d had children before the age of thirty most likely to have? Using PUMS data from the US Census Bureau, we tried to answer this.

The Data

For this article, we looked at data for women between the ages of 29-31 who held jobs between 2011-2015. Specifically, we looked at the percentages of women in each job industry who had had children by the time they reached this age.

You’ll find the full list below, but first, here’s a list of the top twenty jobs.

As you can see, top of the list is Door-To-Door Sales Workers and News And Street Vendors, with Medical Assistants and Miscellaneous Metal Workers And Plastic Workers taking up the second and third spots respectively.

Despite these options being highest on the list, it’s the workers of various office positions who seem to appear most frequently in the top twenty list. Workers in positions like Payroll and Timekeeping Clerks, Court, Municipal and License Clerks, and Credit Authorizers, Checkers, and Clerks all appear early on in our data, giving the impression that office jobs are the industry wherein working women are the most likely to have children.

However, this story changes a little bit when we get to our industry data:

It’s clear from this graph, which shows which industries themselves have the highest likelihood of working women having children, that Office Jobs are not the highest on the list — in fact, they’re all the way down in spot number 7.

The industry with the highest percentage of women with children is actually Health Services jobs, especially when it comes to positions like Medical Assistants or Nursing, Psychiatric, And Home Health Aides.

So Why These Jobs?

Ultimately, this data on its own isn’t all that revelatory, but it underlines a long-existing problem — that women who have children before the age of thirty often have a difficult time finding jobs in careers that require high levels of education.

Take a look at that first graph again. The highest five jobs on that list were, in order: 1) Door-To-Door Sales Workers, News And Street Vendors, 2) Medical Assistants, 3) Miscellaneous Metal Workers And Plastic Workers, 4) Bus Drivers, and 5) Tax Preparers. These are all positions that (at most) require an associate’s degree, and which in some cases require no degree at all. Consequently, they’re also positions that a woman who has given up an earlier career in order to take care of her children would be able to find with relative ease.

That’s not to disparage any of these jobs, or the people who would choose to work them — the fact is that these are often difficult positions with a lot of movement, tedious work, or long hours involved, and often are a combination of the three. But in the event that having a child before the age of thirty had no effect on one’s ability to find a job, you would expect some positions with higher education or training requirements to show up at some point on the list. They never do — instead, the list continues with positions like Weighers, Measurers, Checkers and Samplers, or Religious Workers, or Bill Collectors.

So why is this?

Part of this might be a simple numbers game — there are more of these lower-expertise, lower-income jobs available, so working women would have them due purely to their availability if nothing else. There’s also the fact that in general, the median age for highly educated women to become mothers is around 30 years old, which is also bound to have an effect on this data. But there’s a bit more than this at play here.

Studies have shown that women who hold off on having kids until the age of 30 have significantly lower child-related income drops than those who do have children by then, according to this article from Washington University School of Medicine. The effect is even more pronounced on women without college degrees, losing about two and a half years of their average annual salary over the course of their career.

For those concerned about income loss, the point is not to avoid having children — it’s to have them at the right time. That same Washington University School of Medicine article mentions that while women who give birth before the age of 28 consistently earn less over their lifetime than those who don’t, a strange things happen to those who have children after the age of 31 — rather than lose money, these women actually earn more over the course of their careers. There’s a short term income loss that occurs after any woman has a child, but the older a person is before becoming a mother, the easier this loss is to overcome. In fact, those who wait until the age of 47 add about a half year’s salary to what they’ll earn over the course of their lives.

Wrapping Up

Ultimately, the decision to have a child is one that continues to weigh on women much more than it does on men. Besides the obvious reasons for this (um, they’re the ones having the kid), the income drop that occurs for women with children at an early age is something that working men simply don’t have to contend with. In fact, if you’re a man and have a child in your twenties, you’re more likely to improve your career and make more money in the long run, according to this NY Times article. Men with children are more likely to be hired in the first place than those without, and men also tend to get paid more money after having a child regardless of their age.

Why could this be? What possible reason could there be that women might be punished, financially or otherwise, for doing something that men are regularly rewarded for?

Don’t worry, this isn’t a trick question. It’s sexism. The answer is sexism.

So if you’re a young woman in your twenties plugging away at your nine-to-five job concerned that maybe you aren’t spending enough time planning for your family, you can rest easy knowing that waiting to have kids is almost certainly the smarter option from a financial perspective. If that’s not enough for you, and you find yourself cursing the existence of a institution that routinely punishes its most vulnerable citizens for simply existing, and want to be able to both have a career and start a family in the same way that men are routinely able to do without being punished by this system that you’ve already spent your entire life having to navigate — well, we’re not sure what else to say there.

As for a silver lining, at least waiting to have a kid will let you live a little longer, if nothing else.

Author

Ryan Morris

Ryan Morris was a writer for the Zippia Advice blog who tried to make the job process a little more entertaining for all those involved. He obtained his BA and Masters from Appalachian State University.