Today the BLS released the March edition of "Employment Characteristics of Families Summary." I have never noticed this report before and I've never looked at it, but it's basically just what it sounds like. It lists the employment rates of people depending on whether they're married, have kids, and so forth. Here's one chart:
Men with children participate in the labor force at about the same rate no matter how old their children are.
Women with young children participate in the labor force at low levels but many of them return to work when the kids start school.
And among families with no children under 18, labor force participation plunges to 60% for men and 50% for women. This is fascinating. This group doesn't include retirees, so that's not the explanation. However, it probably does include a wide range of ages among the adults, and it's possible that the average doesn't mean a lot.
I'm not sure I understand precisely what's going on here. At face value, it validates the old saw that people work to put food on the table for their kids. Once the kids leave home, a lot of them quit working and live off savings—or something. This is puzzling.
Older people that are still too young for Social Security vanish from the working world for lots of reasons. Early retirement, living off their own savings and/or private pensions. Long-term disabilities, which usually can be worked through when someone's younger but become much more burdensome with age. Recent or on-the-job disabilities, that emerged suddenly late in life and keep them from returning to the workplace (even as younger people might more easily recover from them). "Forced retirement," when they're laid off and somehow can't get anyone to hire them again despite anti-age discrimination laws. In the case of 2-parent households, suddenly not needing to feed a third (or more) mouth allows one spouse to drop out of the workforce.
Oh and there's the fact that unemployed adults usually have their kids eventually taken away from them, which I assume automatically changes them from "man/woman with child" to "man/women without child" in the stats.
I guess "usually" here should be "often" since some states still allow able-bodied adults with kids to join welfare rolls, which in turn allows them to keep their kids. But with welfare reform limiting adults from being on welfare for "too long," some parents fall through the cracks. My own parents serve as foster parents to kids like this: unemployed mom can't get her sh*t together so the courts strip her temporarily of custody... and about half the kids so far have eventually been resettled with new parents because their original ones can't satisfy the courts that they're stable enough (i.e. employed enough) to be parents.
I've known plenty of people hit rough patches and end up unemployed for long stretches, but not a one ever had their kids taken away. One family I knew was practically on a first name basis with the bankruptcy judge. This sounds like either a report from a very different timeline, or some sort of dystopian fantasy. And if you do have minor kids you are much more likely to be approved for public benefits (AKA "welfare") than if you're childless. Apart from food stamps and ACA Medicaid, childless people who are not elderly or disabled qualify for almost nothing. (I'm not counting UI as a welfare benefit of course, though many states give higher UI benefits to people with dependent children)
"This group doesn't include retirees, ..."
I have no idea what that terminology means. Nor how it would be counted. Nor how it might be correlated with age. Nor ... etc.
Per the chart, "civilian labor force" among non-institutional population, however that's defined-- I think by age? Like 19-65 or something like that? So it could well include early retirees-- and iirc the covid job market "encouraged" a pretty big number of retirements at 62-64 the past couple of years, who'd be among the "forced retirees" Austin mentions. Generally I think Austin has tabbed the big factors, and I'd put my money on disability as one of the bigger ones.
If the lower bound is age 19 right away it includes very young adults who are unlikely to have kids, or to have joined the work force yet.
It's pretty easy to guess what Kevin means: Retirees below the age of 65. His writing is clumsy but not unintelligible. This sort of stuff happens to bloggers sometimes.
I wonder how much of an impact it includes "aimless/graduate student" twentysomethings.
You need to know a lot more about the group with no children - this is a huge group of 87 million who are not "in the labor force", that is neither employed nor seeking employment. What are their ages, marital status, handicaps, health, in school? There are no grounds for assuming they are all old married people who no longer have to support children.
And these days it's not uncommon for parents to be providing some level of support to kids past 18-- college students most obviously.
Kevin's right that this average tells us nothing. Families without children are likely to be young (under 30) or old (over 50). The under 30 group is going to have many people still starting their jobs, holding out for something better, in between jobs, working on their scripts/tiktoks/songwriting/whatever, and so on. Likewise, the over 55 group is going to have many people sick of their stupid job, only working when they need to, preparing for a second career, and so on (although not technically "retired" within the meaning of BLS.)
Just based on the likely ages of childless families, there's lots of reasons for them to be unemployed than a lack of need to feed the kids, and those reasons are almost impossible to generalize.
KD: “Men with children participate in the labor force at about the same rate no matter how old their children are.”
Should be: “Men with children under 18 participate in the labor force at about the same rate whether children are below or above school age.”
KD: “among families with no children under 18, labor force participation plunges to 60% for men and 50% for women….This group doesn't include retirees…”
The Technical Note at BLS defines LFPR as (employed + unemployed [and seeking work or awaiting recall from furlough]) / population. I read this as saying the denominator includes retirees.
"This group doesn't include retirees, so that's not the explanation."
Yes, it does. That's explanation. The table is labor force participation among civilian, non-institutionalized people age 16 and over. There's no age cap. A quarter of the population you're looking at are people age 65+.
Figuring out who's measured in the labor force participation rate is needlessly confusing, but essentially as far as I can see Mavrick Fitzgerald is right-- it takes in all people 16 and over regardless of relationship to the labor market. This is a BLS/CPS definition, and the lack of an age ceiling is not stressed or explained at all in the tables I've seen, but just mentioned in a phrase.
It should be underlined, though, because of other widely-used and similarly-named terms that are more commonsensical. For example, FRED-- which republishes the BLS stat quoting the same very brief definition-- also puts out another one for "working-age population" as defined by the OECD, which is 15-64. BLS itself defines working-age population as 16-64, and prime working-age population as 25-64.
I guess it all depends what you're interested in. For a lot of purposes it makes most sense to look only at either working-age or prime working-age population, and Kevin and most of us seem to have thought that's what the LFPR refers to. But it seems that LFPR is just about the crudest measure there is-- specifically excluding whether people are looking for work or why they might not be working, it takes in everybody in the population who's legally able to be on a payroll, is what it looks like.
That being the case, it's most meaningful in a time series, and least meaningful, if you're going to slice and dice it-- particularly in relation to the effects of having kids in the household-- at the age extremes. 16s to early 20s, say, aren't that likely to have their own kids in the household, and at the other end you have retirees, empty-nesters, and lengthening lifespans for significant subgroups.
It shows the simple fact that children are bloody expensive!!
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/31/547320586/fatherhood-after-forty-its-now-a-lot-more-common-study-finds …
The easy explanation is this: People with no children (this includes the majority of never married people) can afford to retire early. If so you should see that in the age breakdown. Also, couples who have their children at a young age can afford retire earlier than those who have them in their late thirties.
"When the kids grow up, parents stop working" is the wrong conclusion.
You're being fooled by baby boomer retirements. The size of their population is still larger than Gen X despite their age and the actuary table, so, by share of the total number of adults w/ children over 18, nearly half will be near or above retirement age.