Parcours conjugaux et transition tardive vers la première maternité en Europe

Abstract

As family life courses become more diverse and less standardized, first births are increasingly delayed, and many women in Europe are still childless when they reach their thirties. These women have very diverse partnership histories; some have never lived with a partner, while others have experienced cohabitation, marriage or union dissolution. What is the partnership trajectory of women who are childless at age 30? Is the same pattern observed for childless women at age 35? Does it differ from one country to another? Júlia MikoLai addresses these questions using a harmonized database of retrospective monthly union and fertility histories based on data from the Generations and Gender survey conducted in numerous European countries. For a cohort of women born between 1953 and 1962 in 12 countries, she then analyses the probabilities of having a first child conditional on their different partnership experiences. This article sheds light on the diversity of partnership trajectories and on country-specific patterns of family formation.

Partnership Trajectories Preceding Medically Assisted Reproduction

“…As life-course trajectories are becoming increasingly complex, and childbearing is being postponed until later in life (Billari et al 2006;Billari and Liefbroer 2010), the partnership pathways that lead to first parenthood have become more heterogeneous (Jalovaara and Fasang 2015;Mikolai 2017;Guzzo and Hayford 2020). An increasing proportion of women are undergoing MAR treatment to conceive their first child; however, little is known about the partnership pathways and demographics of this growing subgroup of the population.…”

“…These developments have, in turn, triggered changes in women's partnership formation and childbearing preferences, including the postponement of family formation, especially among highly educated women (Ní Bhrolcháin and Beaujouan 2012;Goldscheider et al 2015;Raybould and Sear 2021). Although the postponement of childbearing has been almost universal in developed countries, the partnership pathways leading to first parenthood have become more heterogeneous (Jalovaara and Fasang 2015;Mikolai 2017;Guzzo and Hayford 2020). In this section, we take as the starting point the literature on partnership trajectories that lead to first parenthood and discuss how it can help us understand the partnership trajectories that precede MAR, but we also reflect on the specific partnership trajectories of women who undergo MAR, given that they are experiencing subfertility or are seeking MAR to conceive without a partner.…”

A Novel Macro Perspective on Family Dynamics: The Contribution of Partnership Contexts of Births to Cohort Fertility Rates

“…These gender difference in never-partnering is often explained by partner preferences and norms related to SES, where low-SES men are more disadvantaged than low-SES women in the partner market (Walter et al 2020). For women, never-partnering by age 30 negatively predicts first birth in Western and Northern Europe while the opposite is true in Southern and Eastern Europe, suggesting that union trajectories and their relationship to childbearing vary by context (Mikolai 2017). Likewise, disadvantaged groups are more likely to have conception outside a union, also more likely to remain single following childbirth, and less likely to enter stable unions (as measured by civil status) (Lichter, Sassler, and Turner 2014).…”

“…Prevalence of singlehood (not married or in a cohabiting relationship) shows a flat trend in Finland at about 50 percent at the ages 25–30 and decreasing with age to about 30 percent at the ages 45–49 (Jalovaara and Andersson 2023). Research on lifetime childlessness tends to find that never‐partnering or long‐term singlehood forms a substantive proportion of the childless (Jalovaara and Fasang 2017) and that having never‐partnered in midlife predicts future nulliparity (Mikolai 2017) and current fertility expectations (Hayford 2009). Childlessness is often found to be associated with union instability (Hart 2019; Tanturri and Mencarinin 2008) or expressing concerns about not finding a suitable partner (Berrington and Pattaro 2014).…”

The Transition to a Coresidential Partnership: Who Moves and Who Has the Partner Move In?

“…The transition to coresidence is a crucial event in the process of partnership and family formation. Although an increasing share of couples in many western European countries have a child before they marry, the vast majority of couples live in a joint household before a child is born (Kiernan, 2001;Mikolai, 2017). A growing number of studies have investigated which individual and couple characteristics are related to the probability of starting a joint household versus remaining in a living-apart-together relationship or separating (Krapf, 2018;Régnier-Loilier, 2016;Sassler et al, 2016;Wagner et al, 2019).…”