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	Mean Age at Childbearing	Total Fertility Rate
Field	Demography	Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1968	2001
Originator	Standard demographic practice (fertility schedule moments)	Classical demographic index (formalized by Preston, Heuveline & Guillot)
Type	Summary location measure of the age pattern of fertility	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	MAC, Mean age of the fertility schedule, Mean age of mothers at birth, Ortalama Doğurganlık Yaşı	TFR, Period total fertility rate, Sum of age-specific fertility rates, Toplam Doğurganlık Hızı
Related	4	4
Summary	The mean age at childbearing is the average age of mothers at the birth of their children, computed as the fertility-rate-weighted mean of maternal age over the age-specific fertility schedule. As the first moment of the fertility curve, it summarizes the tempo — the timing — of childbearing in a single number, complementing the total fertility rate, which measures quantum, or how many children are born.	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.