Intergenerational Transmission of Age at First Birth
in the United States: Evidence from Multiple Surveys
Keuntae Kim
Received: 12 November 2012 / Accepted: 3 April 2014 / Published online: 16 April 2014
Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract It is well established that the timing of childbearing is transmitted from
parents to children in the United States. However, little is known about how the
intergenerational link has changed over time and under structural and ideological
transformations associated with fertility behaviors. This study first considers
changes across two birth cohorts from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth
(NLSY) in the extent to which parents’ age at first birth is transmitted to their
children. The first cohort includes individuals born during the late 1950s through the
early 1960s (NLSY79), while the second includes individuals born in the early
1980s (NLSY97). Results from discrete-time event history analyses indicate that the
intergenerational transmission of age at first birth significantly increased for both
daughters and sons. These results were confirmed by analyses of data from three
cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth spanning the same time period.
Over this period, age at first childbirth became increasingly younger for children
born to teenage mothers and increasingly older for those born to mothers who began
parenthood after age 25. These patterns have important implications for the
reproductive polarization hypothesis.
Keywords Age at first birth Á Intergenerational transmission Á Transition
to parenthood Á Discrete-time event history analysis
Introduction
Past research has revealed that fertility behaviors are transmitted from one
generation to the next. Studies of various places and time periods have repeatedly
K. Kim (&)
Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin – Madison, 2445 William Sewell Social Sciences
Building, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA
e-mail: ktkim@ssc.wisc.edu
123
Popul Res Policy Rev (2014) 33:649–671
DOI 10.1007/s11113-014-9328-7
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