presence of a partner and his qualifications help to explain family income, and family
income helps to explain life satisfaction. These are still no more than descriptive
accounts, but we do discuss how far the additional variables in the fuller model may be
consequences of the timing of motherhood, and how far they may reflect other
unmeasured factors which encourage early or delayed motherhood, drawing on the results
of other studies.
THE SOCIAL PROFILE OF AGE AT MOTHERHOOD: SOME DESCRIPTION
Our analysis draws on all the natural mothers in the survey for whom it is possible to
determine age at entry to motherhood (n = 18,517). In nearly 6 out of 10 cases (58%), it
was with a previous child than the cohort member. Table 1 shows that 28.5 percent of
the mothers had entered motherhood at age 21 or less, and 40% at or over age 28. The
proportion of ‘delayers’ is higher among the subset of mothers who were having their
first child in 2000-1, reflecting the trend towards later first births. However the
proportion of delayers is lower in the unweighted samples underlying the analysis
because younger mothers are over-represented in the disadvantaged and ethnic areas
which were over-sampled in the survey. We present the results for the full sample (all
birth orders), not just those mothers whose cohort child was their first, since the
relationships we detected between age at motherhood and other covariates were very
similar regardless of whether the cohort child was the first born.
The cohort mother’s age of motherhood has been derived from the data obtained from her
responses to the MCS first survey. Entry to motherhood is defined as the age at which