Older mums and baby class divide

THE social class of a newborn baby is now closely linked to the mother’s age, an official analysis revealed yesterday.

Babies born to mothers in their thirties and older are likely to belong to well-paid professional or middle-class families, while a baby with a mother in her twenties is likely to be born into a lower-income family.

The class divide was revealed in an Office for National Statistics report that charted the occupations of mothers in 2014.

It showed that, with more women entering higher education and having wider job opportunities over the past three decades, a high proportion of new mothers in their thirties have high-earning careers. These women are behind a boom in the number of children born to older mothers.

In 2014 more than four out of ten babies born to women over 30 – and nearly half of those born to women in their late thirties – had high-paid professional or managerial mothers, the ONS said.

Women who have children in their twenties were more likely to be from ‘routine’ and ‘manual’ job categories.

The lower-paid categories work in jobs ranging from bank staff at the best-paid end, to bar staff at the lowest earning point. Only seven in 100 births to women between 20 and 24 in 2014 were to women with highpaid backgrounds and all fell in the ‘lower managerial’ category, such as nurses.

Some 45 per cent of births in the age group were mothers from lower classes.

The analysis does not take into account the social status of stay-at-home mothers whose partner has a high-paid job, so high numbers are recorded as ‘unclassified’.

More than half of all new mothers under 25 were ‘unclassified’ – and nearly a quarter of those over 35.

The report said: ‘Women 30 and over were more likely to be in managerial and professional groups than women under 30.’