Compare methods

	Own-Children Method	Mean Age at Childbearing
Field	Demography	Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1986	1968
Originator	Lee-Jay Cho, Robert D. Retherford & Minja Kim Choe	Standard demographic practice (fertility schedule moments)
Type	Indirect reverse-survival estimation of age-specific fertility from census microdata	Summary location measure of the age pattern of fertility
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	OCM, Own-children fertility estimation, Reverse-survival fertility estimation from matched children, Kendi Çocukları Yöntemi	MAC, Mean age of the fertility schedule, Mean age of mothers at birth, Ortalama Doğurganlık Yaşı
Related	4	4
Summary	The own-children method is an indirect technique for estimating age-specific fertility rates for the years preceding a census or survey, using only a single cross-sectional dataset in which children can be linked to their mothers within the same household. By reverse-surviving matched mother-child pairs back through time, it reconstructs annual birth rates and total fertility for roughly the previous 15 years without requiring any vital-registration data on births.	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.