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[embitteredhistorian]

This is one of the weirdest questions I have ever seen anyone ask. Besides the obvious time issue...uh...why would someone earning less than the poverty line with no guarantee for a job in 6/7 years have a kid?

[polly_mer]

This is one of the weirdest questions I have ever seen anyone ask. Besides the obvious time issue...uh...why would someone earning less than the poverty line with no guarantee for a job in 6/7 years have a kid?

Because if you wait until your life is perfect, then you will never have kids.  Oh, and many of us did not live below the poverty line in graduate school and were in fields where a BS alone will likely lead to a middle class income, if we did have to leave academia.

[toni52]

Frankly, I find the question ludicrous (and a bit offensive), because it is seems to be based on the presumption that most doctoral students want to have children.  One of the most obvious answers to this question is that some of these folks don't have kids because they don't want to.  Maybe it has nothing to do with whether they are in a doctoral program or not.  Since we really have no way of knowing just how many doctoral students actually fall into this category, why bother asking the question?  

In terms of doctoral students who do want to have kids, there are many factors which affect this decision--the timing of doctoral study being one of the most important factors.  When I started my doctoral program, I was in my late 20s.  I was not married and did not have an SO.  If I was interested in having kids, I would probably only be interested in having them under one of these circumstances.  Given the nature of my doctoral program, dating was difficult (to say the least).  So given these circumstances, the solution would have been to put off having children until after I finished my doctoral program.  I was in my early 30s when I finished--so this would have been fairly typical of what we see with women in academia (and the work world in general).

  

[embitteredhistorian]

Frankly, I find the question ludicrous (and a bit offensive), because it is seems to be based on the presumption that most doctoral students want to have children.  One of the most obvious answers to this question is that some of these folks don't have kids because they don't want to.  Maybe it has nothing to do with whether they are in a doctoral program or not.  Since we really have no way of knowing just how many doctoral students actually fall into this category, why bother asking the question?  

In terms of doctoral students who do want to have kids, there are many factors which affect this decision--the timing of doctoral study being one of the most important factors.  When I started my doctoral program, I was in my late 20s.  I was not married and did not have an SO.  If I was interested in having kids, I would probably only be interested in having them under one of these circumstances.  Given the nature of my doctoral program, dating was difficult (to say the least).  So given these circumstances, the solution would have been to put off having children until after I finished my doctoral program.  I was in my early 30s when I finished--so this would have been fairly typical of what we see with women in academia (and the work world in general).

  

Good point--maybe they're too smart to want kids.

[arizona]

This is one of the weirdest questions I have ever seen anyone ask. Besides the obvious time issue...uh...why would someone earning less than the poverty line with no guarantee for a job in 6/7 years have a kid?

Many graduate students have employed spouses (as I did) and reasonably competitive fellowship packages (as I did). Many of us took time off between college and graduate school, worked decently-paying jobs, and managed to put some money away (as I did). Many of us, seeing the struggles of TT junior faculty with young children, felt that it was far saner to have children when our schedules were far more flexible and there wasn't a ticking tenure clock. Many women--and presumably men, too, although with less biological urgency--simply don't want to wait until their late thirties or early forties to have children, for a variety of reasons.

[toni52]

If we were talking about graduate and professional students in general, then perhaps this question would make more sense.  But we're talking about doctoral students.  We know that in general people in their 20s and 30s have been delaying marriage and childbearing.  Although I do not know the statistics, I suspect that this is even more so the case among people who chose to pursue a PhD.  So the question as it stands, is likely irrelevant as it pertains to the typical doctoral student.  And without some sort of systematic study, there is no way to answer the question.  For every graduate program where there are "many" graduate students who enter the program married with kids, there are plenty of programs where the reverse is true.  For example in my doctoral program, I can only remember a few people who came into the PhD program married and with kids.  The vast majority of the doctoral students in the program were single and did not have children.

Obviously, if you are single and engaged in doctoral study, it's hardly the ideal time to think about having children.  There were no single parents in my doctoral program.  I commend anyone who has the fortitude to go this route and who succeeds.  But it's not a path that I would willingly choose--being a single mother who earns a graduate school stipend and who barely has enough time for herself let alone to raise a child.