Carolina Science Cafe: What’s Going on with U.S. Childbearing?

What’s Going on with U.S. Childbearing? And Should We Be Worried?

As birth rates in the U.S. and elsewhere have declined since the Great Recession, there has been considerable concern among pundits and policy makers over the causes and consequences of low fertility. This concern has prompted a range of efforts to raise U.S. birth rates. In this talk, Dr. Karen Benjamin Guzzo will give an overview of childbearing trends in the U.S., discuss why people are delaying or limiting childbearing, and provide insights into the demographic, economic, and policy impacts of low birth rates. She will round out her talk by highlighting the current policies and efforts to raise birth rates in the U.S. and what they will – and will not – achieve.

About the Speaker

Dr. Karen Benjamin Guzzo is a family demographer and sociologist, and she serves as Director of the Carolina Population Center. She is also a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Guzzo’s research has been funded by multiple grants from the NICHD Population Dynamics Branch (PDB), the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Dr. Benjamin Guzzo’s research has been covered in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Newsweek, and she frequently appears as an expert on U.S. childbearing behaviors and decision-making in national media outlets. She is a member of the Population Association of America’s Board of Directors and chair of the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Sociology of Population section. She has served as a Deputy Editor for Demography since 2017 and serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Marriage and Family, Family Transitions, and Journal of Family Theory and Review.