Childless Expectations and Childlessness Over the Life Course

Abstract

Using nineteen panels of the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-79), we construct life-lines characterizing women's childless expectations and fertility behavior. Onequarter of women in the NLSY-79 cohort ever reported an expectation for childlessness but only 14.8 percent of women remain childless. Childless women follow two predominant life course paths: (1) repeated postponement of childbearing and the subsequent adoption of a childless expectation at older ages or (2) indecision about parenthood signaled through vacillating reports of childless expectations across various ages. We also find that more than one in ten women became a mother after considering childlessness: an understudied group in research on childlessness and childbearing preferences. These findings reaffirm that it is problematic to assign expected and unexpected childlessness labels to the reproductive experience of childless women. In addition, despite their variability over time, childless expectations strongly predict permanent childlessness, regardless of the age when respondents offer them. Longitudinal logistic regression analysis of these childless expectations indicates a strong effect of childbearing postponement among the increasingly selective group of childless women. However, net of this postponement, few variables commonly associated with childlessness are associated with reports of a childless expectation. We thus conclude that the effects of socio-demographic and situational factors on childless expectations are channeled predominantly through repeated childbearing postponement.

Counting on Potential Grandparents? Adult Children’s Entry Into Parenthood Across European Countries

“…For example, compared with other European countries, Italy has the lowest social acceptance of childlessness (Merz and Liefbroer 2012;Sobotka and Testa 2008) but a high percentage of childless women (Beaujouan et al 2017;ISTAT 2018). Childlessness might be the result of a continuous postponement of parenthood (Rybińska and Morgan 2019), which may in turn be attributed to a lack of resources, weak family policies, and/or adjustments of expectations (Beaujouan et al 2017;Rybińska and Morgan 2019;Sobotka and Testa 2008). Thus, it is also possible that in countries where social acceptance of childlessness is low and family policies are weak, the availability of grandparental childcare plays an even larger role in an adult child's decision to become a parent.…”

Preferences, Partners, and Parenthood: Linking Early Fertility Desires, Marriage Timing, and Achieved Fertility

“…This phenomenon, measured at the aggregate or the individual level, is referred to as the underachievement of fertility goals. People change their fertility goals over time, often in response to life events (e.g., Gemmill 2019 ; Gray et al 2013 ; Hayford 2009 ; Heiland et al 2008 ; Iacovou and Tavares 2011 ; Rybińska and Morgan 2018 ), so inconsistencies between early desires, expectations, or intentions and later outcomes may represent evolving goals rather than failures in achieving these goals. Still, considering the difference between desired and achieved trajectories can shed light on possible sources of constraint and recalibration, and measuring underachievement provides a big-picture summary of the underlying life course processes.…”

“…The second is the development of competing preferences—such as aspirations for education, employment, or leisure—that lead people to change their desired family size (Ajzen 2005 ; Berrington and Pattaro 2014 ; Blair-Loy 2009 ). The third is the repeated postponement of parenthood that eventually leads to conflict with biological and social age limits for childbearing (Billari et al 2007 ; Gemmill 2019 ; Rybińska and Morgan 2018 ). In practice, these pathways may intersect—for example, if postponed parenthood due to education and labor market activities leads to changed preferences or age-related infertility.…”

Pathways to Parenthood in Social and Family Contexts: Decade in Review, 2020

“…Motherhood is an important—and central—component of women's identity in the contemporary United States (McQuillan, Greil, Shreffler, & Tichenor, ), and this importance does not vary by education (Tichenor et al, ). Higher levels of childlessness and smaller families among more‐educated women, then, usually result from a series of postponements of parenthood and revisions of earlier fertility expectations (Gemmill, ; Hayford, ; Rybińska & Morgan, ). Based on comparisons between early fertility goals and completed childbearing, college‐educated women are more likely than other groups to “underachieve” their earlier fertility goals (Morgan & Rackin, ).…”