WashPost: Percentage of Teens in US Population at Record Low

Birth rates are dropping in the United States and by the year 2050 teenagers will become just a small percentage of the population if current trends continue to hold true.

Right now, there are fewer teens, as a percentage of the population, than at any point on record, reports The Washington Post, and the numbers will stay low while the population in general gets older.

The news was revealed as a small part of a recent Pew Research Center survey about the changing religious demographics in the world. Data in that survey showed that the numbers of young people ages 13 to 19 over the past 50 years has fluctuated in the U.S., but aside from a few climbs has mostly dropped — from a high of about 15 percent of the population in 1965 down to around 9.5 percent by 2013, with the most recent data coming in a bureau estimate from that year.

The higher rates are from "millennials," a word coined to describe people born in around 1980 to the year 2000. However, as the nation's birth rates drop, so do the numbers of teens.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, there were 3.93 million births in the United States in 2013, a number down slightly from 3.95 million in 2012 and 9 percent below a high in 2007.

The numbers of babies that are being born to women ages 15 to 44 also dropped to a record low of 1.86 in 2013, a number down from the 2.1 babies per mother that the reports said is needed to stabilize the population. And, the reports show, out of every 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, the average births dropped from 63 in 2012 to 62.5 in 2013.

Meanwhile, the numbers of women in prime childbearing years of 20 to 39 have been climbing since 2007, as the kids of "baby boomers" grow up to have children of their own.

The previous low for teenagers, The Post reports, was in 1953, as the babies born during the childbirth boom following World War II had not yet become teenagers.

But before 1900, there were more teens per capita, as Americans' life expectancy was not as long, meaning there were lower percentages of older people to skew the results.

But there are still some parts of the United States where there are more teens, such as in the western states where Mormons and Hispanics tend to have more children.

Further, Census Bureau data shows projections that are not quite so dire, as they show the numbers of teens ages 12-17 fluctuating only by a few points. However, when compared to the numbers of people growing older, it brings the overall percentage of teens down in population trends.

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