American Babies
Understanding the Fundamentally Different Life-Patterns of U.S. Millennial Women
Millennial women have started to reach their 40s, which marks what is typically the tail end of when most women have children. This is a good time to check in with the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) to see how the women in the early part of the Millennial generation have been navigating sex, relationships, and having children over their lives so far.
The NLSY97 study has a tremendous amount of detailed information going back to their teen years on education, alcohol and marijuana usage, heterosexual sexual activity, marriages and cohabitations, number of children, family incomes, church attendance, and more, collected consistently over time from the same individuals. This provides a unique look at not just where these women have ended up so far, but also the sequenced life-patterns that led to where they are today.
Here’s an outline with brief summaries for each section.
Content Index
Life-pattern diversity
This section appears below and is a brief intro to the project.
Three big themes in life-pattern diversity
I discuss three factors that help boil down the multiple pieces of information in the dataset into pretty intuitive themes: (1) higher vs. lower socioeconomic status (SES); (2) Freewheelers (with higher numbers of shorter-term partners) vs. Ring-Bearers (with smaller numbers of longer-term partners), which are patterns that tend to vary between less-religious vs. more-religious women; and (3) sitting on the mating sidelines vs. short-term relationships vs. longer-term relationships.
Childhood origins of the three themes
While the three big themes were derived from the women’s situations and activities throughout their 20s and 30s, in this section I look at how each adult theme relates to where they were at age 15 in terms of family background, school performance, and other variables.
Interwoven themes: Nine typology groups
In this section, I take a more detailed look at nine distinct typology groups for Millennial woman, who layered together the big themes in different ways – Ring-Bearers with higher SES, low-SES single moms, high-SES Freewheelers, sideliners, etc.
Life-pattern diversity
It’s pretty stunning how divergent Millennial women’s lives have been in basic areas like experience with hook ups and other short-term sexual relationships, marriage, education level, and having children (or not).
And it’s not just variations in counts – number of men slept with (what the kids these days would call “body count”), number of times married, number of years of education, number of children had. It’s also variation in timing and sequencing. There are a number of women who had formal educations that extended into their early-mid 20s, started hooking up and partying in their late teens, went wild in their early-to-mid 20s, and transitioned to stable marriages and have had one or two children in their late 20s and 30s. Others went to college, went wild, maintained that party/hook up pattern throughout their 30s, and had no children or maybe one by the end of their 30s.
And there are also a number of women who had already started living with a partner and having children as teenagers, ending up with around three children so far. Others had children as teenagers but without a live-in partner. Others went wild in their early teens and stayed that way while having around one child. Others were relatively abstinent, went to college, never went wild, then got married and have had around three children. Others were relatively abstinent the whole time, more so in their 20s than in their 30s, and have had no children or maybe one by the end of their 30s.
And there are many more patterns, of course, and many more details than these kinds of simple descriptions reflect. How are we to map such a complex landscape?
What I’ll show is that there are a small number of big themes that, when you combine them, really help make sense of a lot of what’s driving the complexity.