Our economy isn't built for the biological clock

Vox

2 days ago

is a policy correspondent for Vox covering social policy. She focuses on housing, schools, homelessness, child care, and abortion rights, and has been reporting on these issues for more than a decade.
Everyone should have the right to decide if and when they have children. Yet over the past 50 years, the United States has built an economy that increasingly works against fertility — demanding more years in school and longer hours at work for people, especially women, in the years when it is biologically easiest for them to have children, and concentrating wealth and income among those past their reproductive prime.
As a result, American schools and workplaces are particularly ill-suited for supporting those who hope to start families earlier than average.
'If I were to complain about how society 'has wronged me as a woman,' it would be that it has treated my limited 'fertility time' with extreme disregard,' wrote Ruxandra Teslo, a genomics PhD student, recently on Substack. 'At each step of the way I was encouraged to 'be patient,' do more training, told that 'things will figure themselves out,' even when I wanted and could have speedrun through things.'
The average age of a new mom is now 27.5, up from age 21 in 1970. I had no interest in having kids in my early twenties, but there are certainly reasons others might want that: Fertility decreases with age, and some find it easier to keep up with young children when they themselves are younger and have more energy. Others hope for larger families so may need to start conceiving earlier, or may prioritize making sure their own parents have many years to spend with grandkids.
Of course, discussing reproductive timelines is fraught. Having others invoke the fact that women experience a decline in fertility with age feels intrusive and insensitive. And the conversation is even trickier today, when anti-abortion activists are pushing a conservative pro-baby agenda from the highest echelons of government and the Heritage Foundation is putting out literature blaming falling birth rates on too many people going to graduate school. (The evidence for that is very weak.)
Yet it's precisely in such moments that progressive leaders should offer clear alternatives that both respect women's autonomy and ensure people can make less constrained choices.
If mainstream feminism ignores the barriers to early parenthood, the right will be all too eager to fill the void. 'If the so-called feminists, as long as they play it by the elite rules, refuse to take seriously what [we] can do to support young families, then the right can move in and say, 'You might as well give up on your stupid ideas and career aspirations,'' marriage historian Stephanie Coontz told me.
Not everyone wants to become a parent, but most women do still say they wish to have children one day. If we're serious about reproductive justice, then it's a mistake to ignore how our schools and workplaces have evolved to be broadly hostile to both fertility and parenthood. Having kids at a younger age is not inherently better — but for those who want to do it, the economy shouldn't be working against them at every step.
Colleges need to support parents, pregnant students, and prospective parents
Many women believe, correctly, that college and graduate education are important paths not only for their own financial well-being, but also to afford raising kids in a country that offers so little support to families. The idea that people can just up and abandon higher education to have kids, per the Heritage Foundation, isn't serious.
'We've just done so much to obscure the reality and to make it seem like, oh, moms are asking for too much, or they're postponing too long, or maybe they shouldn't be going to school so much,' said Jennifer Glass, a sociologist at University of Texas Austin who studies fertility and gender. 'What an idiotic thing to say. The only way that women can get wages that are at all comparable to what's necessary to raise a family is by getting a college degree.'
Yet the US has built one of the longest, most expensive educational pipelines in the world.
One reason many American students take longer to finish undergraduate degrees (or don't finish at all) is because of financial pressures that students abroad don't face.
Nations like Germany, France, and Norway offer free or heavily subsidized university education, while others, including the UK and Australia, have manageable, easily navigable income-based repayment systems. American students are more likely to be juggling multiple jobs alongside coursework, stretching the time to graduation.
The timeline stretches even longer for medical, legal, and doctoral degrees — tacking on years of extra training and credentialing that aren't required elsewhere.
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'There's been an increase in the number of years of schooling that is totally unnecessary,' Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist and Nobel Prize winner, told me, pointing to, among other factors, the explosion of post-docs and pre-docs, plus pressure for applicants to acquire some work experience before even beginning their graduate studies.
'I went to graduate school immediately after college, and schools like UChicago and MIT had rules then that if you were there for more than four years, you paid tuition, so that incentivized people to finish,' she said.
When educational timelines keep stretching with no structural support for parenting, the result is predictable: some people delay having children — or abandon those plans entirely.
This isn't to say there are no parents on university campuses. There are roughly 3 million undergraduates — one in five college students — in the US today who have kids. But student parents are too often rendered invisible because most colleges don't collect data on them and harbor outdated assumptions about who even seeks higher education.
'Colleges and universities still cater to what is considered 'traditional students' — so 18- to 24-year-olds who are getting financial assistance from their parents,' said Jennifer Turner, a sociologist at the Institute for Women's Policy Research.
Student parents are far less likely to be receiving financial help from their own families than students of the same age and background without kids — and in general they're more likely to struggle to afford basic needs. But most campuses neglect their unique challenges and fail to provide them with resources like on-campus housing, kid-friendly spaces, and child care support.
The Trump administration's new budget proposal calls for gutting the only federal program that helps student parents with child care. And while pregnant students are entitled to some federal protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Title IX, in practice many students never even learn about them, or face intense stigma for using them.
For graduate students in particular, there's no shortage of examples of students receiving both implicit and explicit signals to delay childbearing. Research found women were twice as likely as men to cite child care and parenting as reasons for leaving academia.
The financial fears are not irrational
Whether or not women want to have children in their early or mid-twenties, many feel they can't — because the career paths they pursue require longer routes to stability.
Women are more often funneled into professions that demand extra time, whether through extended schooling, slower advancement, or the need to earn extra credentials to prove themselves. Many fields where women are concentrated, like education, social work, psychology, and nursing, require graduate training for higher-paying roles. In contrast, men are more likely to enter skilled trades or businesses where higher earnings are possible without advanced degrees.
Goldin, the economist, pointed to the problem of the 'rat race equilibrium' — where individuals over-invest accumulating credentials not because doing so is intrinsically valuable, but because everyone else is doing the same. In this situation, falling behind the pack carries high costs.
'People want a great job, so they stay in graduate school 'too long.' Firms want the best lawyer, so they keep associates for 'too long.' I don't know what the optimal length is. But I do know that the addition of so many more years means that women will be more discouraged than will men,' she told me.
These extended educational timelines feed directly into jobs that are also not designed to support parenting during a woman's prime childbearing years. Early-career workers typically earn less, have more precarious roles and rigid schedules, and often face more pressure to be fully available to employers to prove their commitment and worth.
Some then move on to what Goldin calls 'greedy careers': Law firms, consulting companies, and hospitals that demand total availability, rewarding those who can work weekends and penalizing those who seek more predictable schedules. For many parents it's a double bind: the educational trajectories and high-paying jobs that make raising kids affordable are often the same ones with demands that make balancing family life nearly impossible.
We can structure society differently
Fertility tech hasn't yet conquered the biological clock, but we did build this economy — which means we can rebuild it differently.
Advocating for more efficient and more affordable education isn't a retreat from academic rigor, but a clear-eyed confrontation with institutions that remain indifferent at best to having children. The most forward-thinking places will see that compressed, focused educational paths aren't diluting standards, but respecting the fullness of human lives and creating systems where intellectual achievement doesn't demand reproductive sacrifice.
Exactly how to help students manage timelines will vary. For those looking at careers in math and science, for example, there may be opportunities to take advanced courses in high school. Others would benefit from more financial aid, or using experiential learning credit, or enrolling in accelerated BA/MA programs.
But even with educational reforms, parents would still face legal barriers that other groups don't. It's still legal in many cases to discriminate against parents in hiring or housing. Making parents a protected class would be a straightforward step toward making parenthood more compatible with economic security.
Stronger labor regulations could also curb workplace coercion, and policies like those in Scandinavia — which allow parents to reduce their work hours when raising young children — could make it easier to balance kids with holding down a job.
The rise of remote work offers additional paths forward, and expanding it could reduce the stark either/or choices many prospective parents face. And there are other policy ideas that could make parenthood more affordable even when people are early in their career. Other high-income countries offer parents monthly child allowances, baby bonuses, subsidized child care, and paid parental leave. The US could follow suit — and go further — by investing in affordable housing, reducing the cost of college, and decoupling health care from employment.
For now, our current system abdicates responsibility. As Glass points out, while parents are paying more to have children, it's employers and governments that reap the benefits of those adult workers and taxpayers, without shouldering the decades-long costs of training and raising them.
'What no one wants to face is that 150 years ago, when everyone lived on farms, having children did not make you poor, but they do today,' said Glass. 'Children used to benefit their parents, they were part of the dominion of the patriarch, and when children did well the patriarch benefited. Now it's employers and governments who benefit from well-raised children.'
It's not feminist to ignore this
I understand the reluctance to have these conversations. We don't want the government poking around in our bedrooms, especially when some lawmakers are already on a mission to restrict reproductive freedom. It's tempting to say policymakers and institutions should just shut up about any further discussion regarding having kids.
But that's not serving people, either. Many other countries already confront these challenges with much more deliberate care. Honest conversations about fertility don't need to be about telling women when or whether to have children — they should be about removing the artificial barriers that make it feel impossible to have kids at different stages of life.
This would all certainly be much easier if men stepped up to take these pressures more seriously. 'If men felt as compelled as women to take time off, if men were experiencing the same thing, I think we'd get a lot more creative,' said Coontz.