Compare methods

	Child-Woman Ratio	Total Fertility Rate
Field	Demography	Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1900	2001
Originator	Established demographic indicator (census-based)	Classical demographic index (formalized by Preston, Heuveline & Guillot)
Type	Indirect fertility index from a single census age-sex distribution	Period summary fertility index synthesizing age-specific fertility rates
Seminal source	Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557864512	Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Measuring and Modeling Population Processes. Blackwell. ISBN: 9781557864512
Aliases	CWR, Child-to-woman ratio, Census fertility ratio, Çocuk-Kadın Oranı	TFR, Period total fertility rate, Sum of age-specific fertility rates, Toplam Doğurganlık Hızı
Related	4	4
Summary	The child-woman ratio is the number of young children, usually those under five, per woman of reproductive age in a population. Computed from a single census age-sex distribution, it is the simplest indirect indicator of fertility, designed for settings where birth registration is absent or unreliable. Because young children are the surviving product of recent births, their number relative to potential mothers serves as a rough proxy for the level of childbearing over the preceding few years.	The total fertility rate (TFR) is the central period measure of fertility in demography: the average number of children a woman would bear over her lifetime if she experienced, at each age, the age-specific fertility rates observed in a given year. Computed by summing age-specific fertility rates across the reproductive ages, the TFR removes the influence of population age structure and gives a single, intuitive figure — children per woman — that is comparable across populations and over time.