Centre for Policy on Ageing



The prevalence of childlessness in cohorts of older women
Author(s)	D T Rowland
Journal title	Australasian Journal on Ageing, vol 17, no 1, February 1998
Pages	pp 18-23
Keywords	Older women ; Childless ; Demography ; Australia.
Annotation	This article defines the immediate causes of childlessness and estimates the percentages of voluntarily or involuntarily childless women in Australia since 1851. The principal data sources were census statistics for various years on marital status and number of children ever born to women. Childlessness is measured for each birth cohort between the ages of 45 and 49; the proportions are expected to be similar at ages 65-69. The proportion of women remaining childless has ranged between 9 and 32 percent in cohorts born since the 1850s. Married childlessness was predominant among cohorts born between the 1890s and the 1920s, because of the effects on family building of the two World Wars and the Great Depression. In 1996, cohorts with relatively high levels of childlessness were among the oldest old. Trends in childlessness draw attention to deficits in the family resources of older people, and raise questions about the adequacy of support for vulnerable groups. (RH).
Accession Number	CPA-980511006 A
Classmark	BD: SU: S8: 7YA
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...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.