Educational attainment and first births: East Germany before and after unification

Abstract

There is a general belief that female educational attainment has a delaying effect on the age at first birth. In this paper we argue that the validity of this hypothesis relies on at least three prerequisites. First, that child rearing and employment is incompatible. Second, that a withdrawal from the labor market harms labor market upward mobility. Third, that child rearing responsibilities are shared according to traditional gender roles. Using data from the German SocioEconomic Panel (SOEP), we analyze the impact of educational attainment on first birth risks in East and West Germany before and after unification. A major result is that, compared to West Germany, the impact of educational attainment on first birth risks is less strong in East Germany. This also applies to the period after unification. We attribute this to the relative abundance of public day care in the East.

Women’s education and entry into a first union. A simultaneous-hazard comparative analysis of Central and Eastern Europe

“…In general the postponement of the entry into first union for higher educational levels (level 2 vs. level 1 in particular) becomes more important after the transition. Increasing chances for upward mobility after the transition may explain why higher educated women tend to postpone entry into first union even further (on education and first births in East Germany before and after the German unification, see the reasoning of Kreyenfeld, 2000): these opportunities may be less accessible to women with lower education. The impact of educational enrolment is more ambiguous, and in terms of size of the impact the change after the transition is never as important as it is for educational attainment.…”

Adolescents’ academic achievement and life satisfaction: the role of parents’ education

“…Especially in Western Germany, the number of mothers returning to work after childbirth is much smaller than in East Germany and most of the European countries ( Bredtmann et al, 2009 ). Moreover, many women and mothers work part-time in Western Germany ( Kreyenfeld, 2000 ) and German policies are known to facilitate traditional gender roles, i.e., women predominantly acting as mothers and housewives, while men are seen as “breadwinners” ( Trappe and Rosenfeld, 2000 ). As parental education and parent-child communication about school have been found to be positively related to children’s positive academic outcomes ( Grolnick and Slowiaczek, 1994 ), it is plausible that parenting work, including communication about education, is mostly done by mothers in Western Germany and consequently affects children’s school issues and satisfaction with life more than fathers do.…”

Cohort fertility patterns in the Nordic Countries

“…In this paper we present the corresponding cohort analyses, in which we study fertility differentials along three dimensions: (i) between birth cohorts, (ii) between social groups according to women's attained educational level, and (iii) between Nordic countries. The educational dimension is important, since a bulk of analyses have shown that childbearing tends to be correlated with various dimensions of education, both as regards timing of births and the final number of children ever born (see, e.g., Blossfeld and Huinink 1991;Knudsen 1993;Liefbroer and Corijn 1999;Lappegård 2000;Lappegård and Rønsen 2005;Kreyenfeld 2006;Hoem, Neyer and Andersson 2006a,b). Cross-country comparative analyses of the relationship between educational attainment and fertility are harder to find, but two recent contributions are provided by Rendall et al (2005) and Neyer and Hoem (2008).…”