More Educated People Don't Have As Many Children As They Want

Razib has an interesting post up inspired by the TNR article discussing the problems of older parenting which everyone is talking about at the moment. The most interesting element in Razib's piece, to my mind, is when he does some quick original research into the fact that more educated people tend to have fewer children:

[T]he General Social Survey asks people about the ideal number of children they’d like to have, versus the actually number of children they do have (CHLDIDEL and CHILDS). To remove demographic confounds I limited the sample below to non-Hispanic white women age 45 and up between the year 2006 and 2010, and compared across educational attainment.

It struck me as very interesting that the desired number of children reported by women of different education levels was very consistent, it was only the number of children actually had that varies.