Looking for a US demographic dataset: parental age by birth year

October 11, 2022 11:19 AM

I'm looking for a dataset that contains the following information: for each year X, I'd like to know the distribution of parental ages of everyone born in year X in the United States. Basically, I'd want to be able to know things like "X% of the people born in the US in 1981 had at least one parent who was born in 1962" or "Y% of the people born in the US in 2003 had parents who were born between 1950 and 1955.

The time period I'm mainly interested in is 1965 to present. Also, I'm not too particular about how the parental data is collected: could be for each parent separately, could be maternal age only, could be data for both parents mixed all together. And, of course, I understand that the data may not be available on a per-year basis but maybe in year buckets (e.g.: instead of data for 2002 it might be data from 2000-2005).

posted by mhum to Grab Bag (3 answers total)

The furthest back that the CDC natality data set can go for you is to 1995 and 'present day' is actually 2020.
The maternal ages are then binned into 5 year tranches, such that it will be like your later example.
posted by Cold Lurkey at 11:55 AM on October 11, 2022

In their birth data publications (2021), NHCS publishes numbers of births by age groups; the simplest thing might be to compile tables from earlier years of that publication, though I don't know how far it goes back.

If you're willing to do more work, they have birth data files going back to 1968.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:39 PM on October 11, 2022

Thanks, everyone! This looks like exactly what I need, particularly the birth data files which appear to be quite detailed.
posted by mhum at 2:00 PM on October 11, 2022