May 11, 2017
The country’s first Mother’s Day was in 1914 under President Woodrow Wilson, but a whole lot has changed since then.
In addition to the ongoing increase in the average age of first-time mothers (21 in 1970, 26 in 2013), more and more American mothers are educated, foreign-born and acting as the sole financial providers for their families.
The Pew Research Center offered several Mom stats just in time for Mother’s Day, including a look at the childbearing rates in highly educated women. Though it’s still common that highly educated women have fewer children than others, the rate of mothers holding master’s degrees has risen by 51 percent between 1994 and 2014.
Though births among U.S.-born women has steadily declined, births among foreign-born women are on the rise. In 2014, Pew found that there were 58.3 births for every 1,000 U.S.-born women between ages 15 to 44. In that same sect among foreign-born women, there were 84.2 births.
One-in-four households name the mother as the sole financial provider, and higher earning women are more likely to use maternity leave than lower income mothers. Household incomes of $75,000 or higher saw mothers take nearly double the amount of maternity leave time than mothers in households of $30,000 or less in annual income. More than half of mothers who took maternity leave (53 percent) said they wish they had taken more time off.
Read the full collection of Pew’s facts about U.S. mothers, just in time for Sunday, here.
