The American birth rate increased in 2024, motivated by mothers over 40 years old

After years of major titles on the birth rate of the world, there is a positive point. The American birth rate increased slightly in 2024, according to preliminary CDC data.

THE A 1% increase in births was largely motivated by the mothers at the start of the forties, which gave birth to 2% of more children in 2024 than in 2023. Moms in the thirties and the end of the 20s also experienced a slight increase in births.

Brady Hamilton, the main author of the report, told Business Insider that statistics were a continuation of trends of the last three decades.

Women from the end of their twenties at the start of the forties have more children, while those of adolescence and the beginning of the twenty have less. These figures “support the assertion that women have children at later moments in their lives,” he said.

Millennium mothers open the way

While millennials have fewer children compared to past generations, they always have more children than the Gen Zers.

In 2024, The CDC noted that women between 30 and 34 had the most children, followed by mothers at the end of the twenty (the elder of the Zers generation).

Emily Oster, the founder of Parentdata.org, a successful author and professor of economics at Brown University, told BI that CDC data indicates two main trends.

The first is that people choose to have children later: the heights of fertility at the start of their twenties, but women in these age groups have had fewer children since the 1990s.

At the same time, medical developments give people more control when they have children, if at all, said Oster.

Births in adolescent girls continue to drop, lowering 3% since 2023, as access to contraceptives has increased. IVF allows women to design well in their forties.

Young people need more time to feel financially ready for children

Not everyone feels ready to have children before the thirties and forty.

“People just take more time to go to their lives when they think they have children,” Professor of Sociology and Director of the Ohio State University research institute told Bi Sarah Hayford.

Parents of the millennium and generation Z need more time to feel enough financial security to start families in relation to past generations.

Some remain at school longer to disembark more paid jobs and allow themselves the houses they want.

“What we see is that people refer to births from the start, then somehow catch up later,” she said.

Trump is on a mission to get more American babies

Despite the rise in births, the Trump administration’s mission is to strengthen the birth rate, “menstrual cycle classes” to give parents $ 5,000 after childbirth.

Many Americans want more children than they have. The challenge is to bring parents to have more.

Hayford said that other rich countries, such as Japan and South Korea, have introduced policies in the hope of increasing their birth rate, such as four -day work and bonuses for men who reverse their vasectomies.

“None of them have succeeded,” she said. Although babies can have a certain impact, “they must be really great” and even then they have a modest influence on birth rates. She said Trump proposed that $ 5,000 would be under the average delivery cost to the United States, which is about $ 13,000 before the insurance return.

Other policy proposals often mentioned by parents, such as lowering childcare costs or lengthening paid parental leave, are not guaranteed to considerably increase birth rate: some Scandinavian countries with better childcare support than the United States also undergoes birth reductions.

“I don’t think we know what it would take for a 26 -year -old heap to have three children,” Oster said. “I’m not sure we have the answer to that.”