“The best way to make children good is to make them happy.”
August 31, 2026
Now that I'm a dad, I'm curious about births, babies, and how things have changed in the past 50 years.
A couple of wild things I've discovered:
Fatherhood marker · selected U.S. time diaries
Average weekly hours rose across the published observations from 1965 to 2011.
This measures time when child care was the father’s primary activity—daily care, teaching, and playing—not every hour a father was physically with a child. The population is U.S. fathers ages 18–64 with an own child under 18 living in the household. The six observations are weighted means that include zero-time diaries; historical survey periods spanning two years are displayed by their conventional chart year. Values through 2000 come from Bianchi’s harmonized national time-diary table; 2011 comes from Pew’s American Time Use Survey analysis. No years are interpolated. Sources: Bianchi, “Family Change and Time Allocation in American Families” and Pew Research Center.
Infant-feeding marker · U.S. birth cohorts
Among breastfed infants born in 2023, about one in five received formula before age two days.
This is not the percentage of all babies who ever receive formula. CDC’s precise measure is the share of infants who were breastfed and also supplemented with formula before two days of age; the denominator is breastfed infants at that age. Estimates come from maternal recall in the National Immunization Survey–Child and exclude U.S. territories. The 2023 estimate is 22.6% ± 1.1 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Source: CDC National and State Breastfeeding Rates.
Motherhood marker · 50 years of U.S. labor data
The share of mothers with children under 18 who were working or looking for work rose by roughly 27 percentage points from 1975 to 2025.
Labor-force participation means working or actively looking for work; it is not the same as the employment rate. “Mothers” here means women with biological, step-, or adopted children under 18 living in their household. Every official annual observation is plotted. The 1975–2021 segment consists of March CPS/ASEC snapshots; the second 2021 point and 2022–2025 segment are monthly CPS annual averages. The duplicate 2021 values—71.7% and 71.2%—make that reference-period break visible. A separate CPS redesign also limits comparisons across 1993–1994. The 2025 estimate is an 11-month average because October data were not collected during the federal shutdown. Sources: U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau, its downloadable chart data, and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Family-size marker · United States
The total fertility rate fell from 1.77 births per woman in 1975 to a final 1.60 in 2024, after briefly returning above two births in the 2000s.
“Births per parent” is conventionally measured as the total fertility rate: the number of births a hypothetical woman would have if that year’s age-specific birth rates persisted throughout her reproductive life. It is a period estimate, not the completed family size of an actual cohort, and it is expressed per woman because birth records and population denominators are organized by maternal age. The chart contains all 50 annual observations. Values through 2023 use World Bank indicator SP.DYN.TFRT.IN, sourced from the United Nations World Population Prospects. The 2024 point uses CDC/NCHS’s newer final result of 1.5995; the World Bank series still carries the earlier provisional 1.6265. Sources: World Bank, the downloadable API series, and CDC/NCHS final 2024 natality data.
Timing marker · U.S. first births
Published national snapshots place the estimated median age at first birth at 22 in 1960, 24 in 1990, and 27 in 2023.
This chart uses the median requested—not the more commonly published mean. The National Center for Family & Marriage Research estimated the median from first-birth distributions binned into five-year maternal-age groups, using interpolation. Comparable published median snapshots are available for 1960, 1990, and 2023, so the chart shows a 63-year span rather than inventing annual values for an exact 50-year window. It describes mothers’ age at first live birth, not the age of both parents. Source: NCFMR analysis of CDC WONDER and Vital Statistics.
Population projection · World
United Nations medium-scenario population estimates from 2024 through 2100.
Values are the UN’s medium demographic scenario, not a prediction with certainty. They are total population on July 1 and were released in 2024. Source: UN World Population Prospects 2024, processed by Our World in Data.
Population projection · United States
U.S. Census Bureau main-series population estimates from 2024 through 2100.
Values are from the Census Bureau’s main series and refer to the resident population on July 1. The 2023 projection release uses 2022 as its base and extends through 2100. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 National Population Projections and Main Series Table 1.