Gretchen Livingston is a senior researcher at Pew Research Center. She is an expert on fertility and family demographics. In addition, she studies immigrant adaptation and technology use among Latinos. Prior to joining Pew Research Center, she was a visiting research fellow at the Princeton University Office of Population Research. She earned her doctorate in demography and sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Since joining Pew Research Center, she has written on stay-at-home mothers, the relationship of fertility and the recession, fatherhood, grandparent caregivers, childlessness, and fertility and education. Livingston has discussed her work with numerous print and broadcast outlets.
For women, postgraduate education and motherhood are increasingly going hand-in-hand. Not only are highly-educated women more likely to have kids, they are also having bigger families than in the past.
The latest figures show that 66% of mothers who gave birth to their first child between 2006 and 2008 worked during pregnancy, up from 44% in the early 1960s.
More than half (54%) of mothers near the end of their childbearing years with at least a master’s degree had their first child after their 20s. In fact, one-fifth didn’t become mothers until they were at least 35. Some 28% became moms in their late 20s, and 18% had children earlier in their lives.
Just 46% of U.S. kids under 18 are living in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage, a marked change from 1960.
In 2013, 40% of new marriages in the U.S. included at least one partner who had been married before. Almost 42 million Americans have been married more than once, up from 22 million in 1980.
How common is it for new parents to put down roots in the same areas that they themselves were born? The answer, according to a new Pew Research analysis, depends on which part of the country they hail from.
For the first time in decades, the non-marital birth rate in the U.S. has been declining. It’s likely that the decline occurred as a result of the economic recession of 2007-2009.
Among mothers with professional degrees, such as medical degrees, law degrees or nursing degrees, 11% are out of the workforce in order to care for their families, as are 9% of Master’s degree holders and 6% of mothers with a Ph.D.
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