The Rise of the Childless Americans

The Chicago Tribune reports:

Emily Connolly and her husband hadn't even cut the cake at their wedding reception before friends and family started asking: When are the babies coming?

"Um, they're not," Connolly wanted to say.

Instead she deflected the questions and wondered for about the millionth time why people assume that all couples want kids.

Connolly, a 24-year-old Wicker Park retail saleswoman, and her husband, Jimmy, have no plans to have children. And don't even think about telling Connolly that she'll change her mind.

"Babies have just never interested me," she says. "My husband and I didn't get married to have children. We got married for us."

Connolly's attitude is becoming more common, says Linda Rubinowitz, a psychology professor at Northwestern University's Family Institute.

"People feel like they do have a choice, although for other generations it didn't seem like that," Rubinowitz said, noting that throughout American history traditional values have reinforced the idea that having children after getting married is a requirement.

"The natural path was: Go to school, get married, have children, have grandchildren, retire," she says.

In recent years, though, about one-fifth of U.S. women reach the end of their childbearing years--40 to 44--without having kids, says Martin O'Connell of the Census Bureau. That's about twice as many as in the '70s and '80s, he says.

A modern urban American trend.Would this have happened without the rise of the welfare state?