Children Benefit

The children of those women also benefit, Sawhill found. Preventing unexpected births lifts a child’s lifetime income by $52,000, according to Brookings’ study released yesterday. College and high school graduation rates both increase, while the chances of the child becoming a teen parent or being convicted of a crime decline.

“Delaying childbearing until you’re ready to be a parent is not just about improving your own life, it’s about giving your children greater opportunities in life,” Sawhill said.

The mean age of mothers having their first child was 25.8 years in 2012, up from 21.4 years in 1970, a December report from the health and human services department showed. Meanwhile, the cost for a middle-income family to raise a child born last year to the age of 18 is $245,340, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

While Weaver, who has been living with her boyfriend for a little over a year, does want children one day, she’d like to be more financially stable first, she said. She began a new job yesterday as a membership-sales consultant at Cooper Aerobics Center, which was founded by the man who coined the term for the exercise.

Start Savings

“I don’t want to have kids until I know I can start saving for them and making sure I can give them the same education and everything that I was given,” Weaver said.

The choice to postpone childbirth may already be showing up in jobs data. The difference in labor force participation rates between men and women 20 to 24 years old reached a record low at the end of last year, according to data from the Labor Department. The rate was at 66.9 percent in August for young women, compared with 73.8 percent for young men.

Reasons behind the delay in motherhood vary. For teens, birth rates have been falling since the late 1950s amid reduced sexual activity, increased use of contraception and more effective methods of birth control, according to the health and human services’ department’s report.

While the teen birth rate’s decline is “good news, it still remains higher than many other developed countries,” said Stephanie Ventura, senior demographer at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland. “The U.S. still has a way to go, but it’s made tremendous progress.”

Media’s Influence

More recently, media influences, such as the MTV show “16 and Pregnant,” which depicts the struggles of expectant adolescents, as well as the severity of the recession contributed to the reduction in teen births, according to an analysis by Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine, research associates for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research.

The economic downturn’s impact probably extended beyond teens to delay childbearing among young women, Brookings’ Sawhill said. As companies slashed jobs, the unemployment rate soared to 10 percent and consumer confidence dropped to a record low, young adults held off on having children amid a lack of financial security.