The results confirm earlier studies, indicating that childlessness is not necessarily linked with diminished subjective well-being among older adults. However, marital status represents an important context within which to understand and evaluate the experience of parental status.

Middle and Old AgeSurveys show little evidence of psychosocial disadvantage among childless middle-aged and older adults, but less is known about the diverse experiences that influence subjective well-being among parents and childless adults. In this article, the author uses the National Survey of Families and Households to test a parental-status typology on the basis of attitudes among childless adults and parent-child relationship quality and the connection of these factors with loneliness and depression. Poorer parent-child relationships are linked to worse outcomes for both mothers and fathers, net of other factors. For childless adults, negative attitudes about childlessness are associated with greater distress for women than for men.

We explore women's psychological well-being in late midlife in relation to childlessness and timing of entry into motherhood. Using two U.S. surveys, Health and Retirement Study (HRS) (1992) and National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) (Sweet, Bumpass, & Call, 1988), we assess the well-being of childless women in their 50s compared to mothers with early, delayed, or normatively timed first births. We focus on the cohorts born between 1928 and 1941, who experienced strong normative pressures during the baby boom with regard to marriage and child-bearing. We find few differences among childless women but lower well-being among early mothers, related to singlehood and poorer socioeconomic status. Unmarried mothers are significantly disadvantaged regardless of maternal timing, controlling for socioeconomic status. Current maternal demands are independently related to well-being and help to explain observed differences in family satisfaction. Overall, childlessness and off-time child-bearing are related to midlife well-being through their link with more proximate factors, particularly current marital status, health, and socioeconomic status.

The prevalence and implications of childlessness in old age are compared across nine major surveys in seven countries: Australia, Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Specifically, the researchers examine indicators of the well-being and resources of childless men and women, compare them to their within-country peers with children, and explore the similarities and differences among childless older adults in different countries. The results show strikingly similar patterns across countries (with the exception of Japan). Childless elders are more likely than parents to live alone or in an institution. Childless never-married women have consistently higher education levels than other groups of women. Among men, marriage rather than parenthood is consistently linked with higher socioeconomic status. The results suggest important structural processes that differentially shape the resources and well-being of men and women, childless and parents, over the life course and in old age.

We use a method of standardization and decomposition developed by Das Gupta to update Smith and Cutright's analysis of demographic factors responsible for increases in the nonmarital fertility ratio (illegitimacy ratio) among blacks and whites in the United States. We create standardized rates for each year between 1960 and 1992, and consistent, exhaustive decompositions of the nonmarital fertility ratio for any interval during this period in terms of four components: (1) the age distribution of women of reproductive age, (2) the proportion of women unmarried at each age, (3) the age-specific birth rates of married women, and (4) the age-specific birth rates of unmarried women. Nonmarital fertility ratios are much higher among blacks than among whites, but both increased monotonically from 1960 to 1992. During the last 10 years, each increased by nearly 10 percentage points. Increases in the proportion of women not married, at all ages, account for the preponderance of the increase in black nonmarital fertility ratios. Increasing rates of unmarried childbearing, however, have played a role during the most recent decade (1983-1992). For whites, from 1960 until 1975, declines in marital fertility were most important in producing increases in the proportion of children born out of wedlock. Since then, these proportions have increased primarily because of increases in unmarried women's birth rates, and secondarily because of declines in the proportion of women who are married. These trends are consistent with arguments that emphasize declining economic incentives to marry and reduced access to, and acceptability of, abortion.