5th November 2012 | by MFC Team
Women university grads waiting longer to have children
Female university graduates are, on average, delaying the process of trying to conceive their children until their mid-30s – almost a decade later than those women who don’t pursue a university education. In today’s social climate, more and more women are establishing their careers before having children. This has some potentially positive and negative consequences. On the positive side, women who wait to establish their careers prior to beginning their families often have greater financial security. However, on the negative side delaying childbearing may also have some negative consequences – such as declining fertility and increased risk of genetic conditions such as Down’s Syndrome. Older mothers may feel more mature and settled in their lives, but they may also find the demands of motherhood to be more challenging in terms of coping with sleep deprivation, for example. Another consequence of this trend is older grandparents – with more people not becoming grandparents until they are in their 70s. According to a study conducted by Professor Danny Dorling: “Society has split into two groups. One group, of women graduates…is having children very late and the rest are having them” an average of ten years earlier, “at much the same age as their mothers and their grandmothers did.” She suggests that the social trend toward university-educated women delaying childbearing has become the norm in many industrialized countries including the UK, Canada and the US.
Read more about this trend here:
Women graduates wait until they hit 35 to before having their first child [Daily Mail Online]