Highlights
Sociologists seem to be spending a great deal of effort demonstrating that people who want to have children are more likely to have them in stable relationships. I guess that makes sense: my sociological theory professor in graduate school told the class that a mark of good sociology was your next-door neighbor being unimpressed. That is, conclusions from painstaking data gathering and analysis should seem like common sense to others living in your society.
It nonetheless seems as though research has been slow to embrace the importance of relationship quality and stability in understanding why fertility averages less than two children per woman, even though many people still say “two” when asked their ideal number of children. Recently, I’ve seen indications that researchers seem to be circling in on a hypothesis your next-door neighbor might once have regarded as common sense: finding the right time to have children is complicated by the quality of adult romantic relationships.
Couple Dynamics
During the last week of March, the Ohio Population Consortium hosted a webinar called “The Relational Context of Fertility Goals.” It was a nerdy meeting with experts discussing all sorts of measurement issues involved in helping our data speak to the question of why people who want at least two kids often don’t have them. An overarching theme was that research needed to shift from individual preference to couple dynamics. Fertility research using couples’ data used to be focused on two questions: whether he wants the same number of children she does, and who gets their way if preferences differ. “Couple dynamics” means much more than that today: Partnership turnover, quality of relationships, and stability of relationships all influence whether even couples who want the same number of children actually have them. The term also embraces the reality that even fertility desires are dynamic, i.e., change over time. Someone who wants two children when entering adulthood might not still want two at age 40 (or 50); someone who wants two children and has one may not want a second child—given that it would be with a new partner. If his desires and hers both change during the relationship because of things like a promotion or dissatisfaction with the partner, or unemployment, there is the additional complication of not necessarily being pro-child at the same time.
Partnership turnover, quality of relationships, and stability of relationships all influence whether even couples who want the same number of kids have them.
Panelist Nicole Hiekel recast the question of why people don’t achieve their fertility goals in this way: why are there so many relationships contexts in which parenthood never becomes possible? She further described how data collected from both partners over time could reveal how relationships become (or fail to become) viable contexts for childbearing. With such data we could understand both why fertility goals change over time and what circumstances make them more likely to be met, and maybe also what keeps men’s and women’s pronatalist goals from aligning at the same point in time. Such an approach puts emphasis on feasibility of childbearing rather than desire. This is not a surprising focus in research trying to answer the question of why fertility has fallen so much below desired fertility (or even intended fertility).1
Couple data collected over time could also illuminate how financial circumstances and gender ideologies interact with fertility goals. In other words, relationship quality and stability are not the only pieces in the lower-than-desired fertility puzzle. Nonetheless, the field’s attention to couples’ fertility decision-making seems to be growing.
Social Norms Matter
A week after the Ohio Population Consortium webinar, the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) hosted a debate titled “When Populations Shrink: Should States Encourage Births or Adapt?” The team arguing for states to support the birth rate included Anna Rotkirch, who acknowledged that traditional family policies have worked to some extent in Nordic states like her native Finland, but she advocated instead for a new three-part package of family formation policies. It almost seemed like she was echoing the Ohio panel in saying we get something out of focusing on individuals, but we’ll do much better paying attention to their relationships. Reiko Hayashi from Japan, who was on the same team with Rotkirch, was not quite as focused on relationships, but she nonetheless drew attention to marriage support (matchmaking and advocacy) and housing support as policy levers. Importantly, she also highlighted that state policy—whether tangible subsidies or less tangible support for relationships—can shape social norms. Social norms in today’s world tend to emphasize individual success. But reproductive success necessitates interdependence.
Midlife Singleness
Just nine days after the IUSSP debate, Susan Brown, Wendy Manning, and Karen Guzzo published “The Future Family Desires of Single Early Midlife Adults,” which confirmed that interdependence in the form of family ties is not desired by a substantial minority of 30- to 50-year-olds in the United States. First, singlehood is common at these ages: 1 in 3 is neither married nor cohabiting. Second, not all of these singles desire partnership: substantial shares either did not want to cohabit or marry (about 25%) or were uncertain about their desires (about 20%). Most importantly for the birthrate, most (more than 80%) did not want to have a child in the future, regardless of whether they had any now. This means that if someone is single at midlife, they are unlikely to have a child even if they might have wanted two in some scenario that never unfolded.
Relationship Uncertainty
Uncertainty has always mattered for childbearing, but its meaning has shifted. People used to avoid pregnancy during armed conflict or economic stress; fertility typically rebounded afterwards. Today’s world has political, economic, climatic, epidemiological, and informational uncertainty. But there is also a relationship recession. Current research is just beginning to appreciate how important that recession is for childbearing, and this could lead to a better understanding of how to support couples in having the children they want.
Laurie F. DeRose (Brown University, Ph.D.) is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.
