What are the odds that I have a child?

I was trying to figure this out for another blog article and I decided showing my work might derail the other entry. Still, I thought it was kind of interesting so I included it here.

Caveat: I am not a statistician. I am not a demographer. I have no special skills or training to be qualified to make these estimates. You have been warned.

I figured the first thing I’d need to do was figure out how many Americans are parents. Fortunately the US Census Bureau publishes ‘Facts for Features & Special Editions’ which gives snaps shots of statistics for special occasions…like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. According to those there are 82.8 million mothers and 64.3 million dads. I was kind of surprised how not close those numbers were. I guess the Nuclear Family really is an outdated ideal. So in total there are roughly 147.1 million parents in the US.

Then I decided that I just needed to find out how many US citizens there are and I should be able to calculate the percentage of Americans who are parents. That turns out to be either 298.6 million or 306.3 million depending on where you hastily pull your numbers from. I’m going with 298.6 since I’m pulling other numbers from that table too.

With all those parents running around there are bound to be a lot of kids running around too (for instance, I am in fact, someone’s child). I guess what I’m really trying to figure out is what are the odds that someone who is old enough to have a child has one. I think it safe to subtract out all the kiddies out of the national population. According to that previous table 20.4% of Americans (60.9 million) are between 0-14 years old. I don’t think there are too many parents in this category so I’m going to subtract them out. That’s leaves 237.7 million potential parents.

We know that 147.1 million of those potential people actually are parents, so that means if you are over 14 years old there is a 61.9% chance that you are a parent. Better than 50/50 chance… on your sweet sixteen (relax I’m being facetious, I know there are distributions that I’m ignoring).

To indulge a bit further, let’s pretend that the number of parents under 19 years old is negligible. If you run the numbers again you find out that 68% of people over 19 years old are parents. If you decide that the number of parents younger than 24 is negligible (I think this starts to become an iffy assumption) then 75.3% of Americans are parents.

I’m sure if I spent the time to find a breakdown of number of parents by age then I could come up with some more accurate numbers. Suffice it to say, when it comes to breeding…everyone is doing it.

My suspicion that not having children by my age makes me a bit of an oddball seems to be support by the numbers…and the accusing looks I get from strangers when I tell them that I don’t. Honestly, sometimes it’s enough to make me not want to go and get a haircut.

Update:
I think I found one source of error in the work. The numbers for population by age are from 2007. The number for parents are from 2009. Eh, close enough. I don't feel like reworking them right now.