{
  "id": "1997-september-whos-bringing-up-baby",
  "slug": "1997-september-whos-bringing-up-baby",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-september-whos-bringing-up-baby.html",
  "year": 1997,
  "month": "September",
  "monthNum": 9,
  "headline": "Who's bringing up baby?",
  "kicker": "CAR delivers",
  "author_name": "Kara Morrison",
  "author_title": "",
  "affiliation": "NICAR",
  "summary": "A Minneapolis Star-Tribune reporter used birth records database and Microsoft Access to analyze trends in parental ages in Minnesota, discovering that parents are having children later in life, with particular cultural patterns among Hmong families.",
  "keywords": [
    "database",
    "analysis",
    "trends"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Data & Databases",
    "Journalism & Newsroom"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "Access",
    "Excel"
  ],
  "full_text": "Bill Loving was looking for new feature story ideas from a commonly used database: birth records. When a 63-year-old California woman gave birth in May, Loving found what he was look- ing for. He decided to look at the ages of Minnesota mothers and fathers to see whether they were waiting longer to have children. Loving, computer-assisted reporting editor at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, worked with reporter Tatsha Robertson on the story called \"Birth of a Trend.\" The story ran June 8. Aging trends To do the analysis, Loving used Microsoft Access. Rather than ranking ages by birth dates, he created new age fields using Access's date arithmetic function. He entered the func- tion syntax into an update query, adding a new field called MomsAge. Here's how it is ex- pressed in Access: DateDiff MomsDOB] [ BabysDOB] ) where MomsDOB is the mother's birthdate field and BabysDOB is the baby's birthdate field. The \"y\" means express the difference in full years. After doing this, he was able to group and sort the ages in descending order to find the oldest mothers. \"We did include fathers as well and saw a surprising number in their 70s and even early 80s,\" Loving said. By flipping the query into an Excel table, the trend became obvious. He graphed the age query using birth records from 1980, 1985, 1990 and 1995, and found a marked shift toward parents having children later in life. Between 1985 and 1995, he found the aver- ageage of Minnesota women giving birth jumped from 26.6 to 28.5. In 1995, the oldest woman to give birth was 53; the oldest father of a newborn was 83. And the number of Minnesota teenagers having children dropped, while more women became mothers in their 30s and 40s. From the database, they also saw a distinct cultural difference in the Minnesota population. \"In the oldest parents, the majority were Southeast Asian,\" Loving said. Knowing this, Robertson researched why especially Hmong men and women were more likely to have children later in life. She found that in Laos, few couples use birth control and the mortality rate is high, so they typi- cally keep having children. The Hmong families who live in Minnesota continue the cultural practice. Because the database contained addresses, Robertson was able to interview the perfect Min- nesota woman to embody the trend toward late motherhood. Carole Kowitz, a new mother of twins in her 50s, was the focus of the story. \"Guys have been doing this for years and years,\" Kowitz said in the story. Now women are doing it and everyone's aghast.\" Naming names Loving said Robertson, a recent NICAR bootcamp graduate, also wanted to use the database for a story on baby names. She and Loving decided rather than focusing on the most popular baby names, they would focus on the most unusual. The hardest part here was narrowing the list. Among the names they cited: Praise T.L. (for \"Praise the Lord\"), Pepsi, California Seven, Lexxus, Queen Sarauniya, Moon Man and Gentle. Loving also noticed through his queries that the number of names given out had increased dramatically. In addition to an increase in ethnic names, Loving said there appeared to be less of a copycat effect than in earlier years, when several parents gave children common names. In the story that ran July 13, Robertson inter- viewed several parents who had searched for unique names. She also interviewed experts about popular ethnic names and historic trends in choos- ing names. Robertson and Loving also contrasted popular names given in 1995 with those given a decade earlier. In all, Loving said the computer analyses were straightforward and each took only an afternoon to complete. And, he maintains there are other stories hiding in the database he hopes to pursue. \"The database is kind of a standard every CAR program should have,\" Loving said. Loving had no problems obtaining the data- base from his state health department, which charges $50 for the annual database. The one glitch he encountered is that the database does not contain names of babies born out of wedlock. Kara Morrison can be reached at (573) 882- 0684, or by e-mail at kara@nicar.org",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "pre-v2",
    "extracted_at": "",
    "verified": true
  },
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  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-september-whos-bringing-up-baby.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1997-september-whos-bringing-up-baby.json"
}