Changing Fertility Regimes and the Transition to Adulthood: Evidence from a Recent Cohort. by

Recent demographic trends have produced a distinctive fertility regime among young women and men in their teenage years and their twenties-- a period sometimes called early adulthood. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort, show that by the time the cohort had reached ages 26-31 in 2011, 81 % of births reported by women and 87 % of births reported by men had occurred to non-college graduates. In addition, 57 % of births had occurred outside of marriage for both men and women. Moreover, 64 % of women (and 63 % of men) who reported a birth had at least one child outside of marriage, a figure that rose to 74% among women (and 70 % among men) without 4-year college degrees. It is now unusual for non-college-graduates who have children in their teens and twenties to have all of them within marriage. The implications of these developments are discussed in light of the differing transitions to adulthood of non-college-graduates versus college-graduates and the growing social class inequalities in family patterns. In this paper, we argue that recent demographic trends have produced a distinctive fertility regime in early adulthood that reinforces the growing social class differences in American family life. By a fertility regime we mean both the union context of fertility (whethe