how old will I be...

So I was just doing a write-up on a short study I did that took a look at the age at which a person has their first kid. I ended up comparing two groups - men and women - to see what the differences are. It was kind of interesting...

Men in general will be older than women when they have their fist child, by something in the range of 7 years older. When it comes down to what some of the effects are that will typically push of when one will have their kid, there are also differences between men and women.

Women tend to be much more susceptible to the things they are doing in life. That is, when they have their first kid depends a fair amount on what all they are involved with or pursuing. The biggest effect in the model that I ran was education. The amount of education that a woman has as well as (oddly enough) the amount of education that their dad has will both push off having kids to a later age and had the largest effect. I would assume that there is a relationship between the level of one's dad's education and whether or not the person will pursue education for their self (but oddly enough again, mother's education was unrelated).

On the other hand, what men are doing matters less. The thing that matter the most for men seems to be plain old life situations - namely how old they are. So, for men it may not matter as much what they are doing in life, but just life itself that will impact how old they are when they have that first kid.

An interesting side note: when testing for education levels, there was a stronger multicollinearity effect for men than women. This is just fancy talk for saying that the different questions about education meant something different for men and women. For women the questions about their education, their dad's education, mom's education, and spouse's education all meant something a bit different. For men, on the other hand, these questions about education all overlap a bit more and meant the same things. In other words, the education questions for men were measuring something that meant the same thing for men while for women the questions meant something different. Maybe boys will do what they want with school no matter if their dad cares or not, while women will be impacted more in their own pursuit of education by how much their dad cared about it (assuming getting education means one cares about it).

There ya go.