Delayed Marriage and Childbearing: Implications and Measurement of Diverging Trends in Family Timing

This chapter contains two parts. In the first part, I review the implications of marriage and birth timing for women, couples and children, based on published findings in the Sociological, Psychological, Economic, and Medical literatures. In the second, I review descriptive studies on the recent divergence in marriage and first birth timing and supplement them with my own descriptive analyses.