The level of childlessness at the end of the childbearing period was very low among women born in the 1940s. Nevertheless, in Britain a large proportion of people in their 30s who are still childless express a strong desire to have children.
Fertility Outcomes
Overall, respondents' intentions to get pregnant at age 30 differed by gender: around two-thirds of both men and women who were childless expressed an intention to have at least one child, 12% said they had not intend to have a child, while around 20% said they are unsure. The majority can therefore be classified as procrastinators, i.e. they have a positive intention to have a child, but they remain childless.
Partnership Experience and the Likelihood of Achieving Intentions
By comparison, about half of those who cohabited at age 42 remained childless. By comparison, childlessness was higher among those who married after age 30 but then divorced.
Reasons for Remaining Childless
Work and Careers Not Reported as the Main Reason
The vast majority (nine out of ten men and eight out of ten women) of those who had never been married and had no common partner were childless at age 42. A small proportion of respondents (3% of men and 4% of women) stated that their partner does not want children, which reminds us of the importance of the couple in reproductive behavior.
The Importance of Having a Partner
Discussion
In terms of the 'continuum of childlessness', this so-called 'certain group' (or 'early articulators'), who declare that they do not intend to have children, are a minority (about one in eight of those currently being childless). 30 years).6 The majority of both men and women are 'procrastinators', as by age 30 just under two-thirds of childless men and women express a positive intention to have a child. Consistent with findings from previous British and American cohorts, respondents achieve both below and above their target fertility (Morgan and Rackin 2010; Berrington and Pattaro 2014), but childless procrastinators are likely to underperform, with a total of 30% of those currently were childless. 30 years old and who said they planned to have a child were still childless at age 42.
Appendix
The Longitudinal Study of UK Households is carried out by the Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex. The British Birth Cohort 1970 (BCS70) is conducted by the Center for Longitudinal Studies, Institute of Education, London.
Literature
The Pill and Women's Employment as Factors in Fertility Change in the UK A Challenge to the Conventional View. The images or other third-party material in this chapter are included in the work's Creative Commons license, unless otherwise noted in the credit line; if such material is not included in the work's Creative Commons license and the action in question is not permitted by statutory regulation, users must obtain permission from the license holder to duplicate, adapt or reproduce the material.
Childlessness in France
- Introduction
- Institutional Framework and Family Policies
- Female Employment
- Fertility and Ideal Family Size
- Childlessness
- How Is Childlessness Measured in France?
- Development of Childlessness
- Differences in Childlessness by Education and Occupation of Women
- Men and Childlessness
- Conclusion
Men born after 1940 in France remained childless to the same extent as women if they ever lived as a couple. While the age at first birth has increased in France, birth rates have not decreased.
Childlessness in East and West Germany
Long-Term Trends and Social Disparities
Introduction
When Adenauer made his famous statement, the fertility patterns in the two parts of Germany were quite similar. In the 1960s, the age at first birth was low, and the total fertility rate was around replacement level in both East and West Germany. The growth in childlessness in West Germany was accompanied by a steady increase in the age at first birth, a delay in marriage and a surge in cohabitation.
In retrospect, West Germany emerges as one of the "vanguard countries" in Europe in the trend towards high levels of childlessness. In the next section (Section 5.2), we present data from census and vital registration systems that shed light on long-term trends in childlessness in East and West Germany.
Childlessness in German Census and Micro-census Data
However, there is also evidence that behavioral patterns have changed among the most recent cohorts and that educational gaps are narrowing for younger cohorts of West German women. Due to the lack of information on male fertility in official data, we supplement the official data with estimates of the number of children by sex based on social survey data and illustrate the main pathways leading to childlessness among recent birth cohorts in Germany.
Long-Term Trends in Childlessness
Social Disparities in Childlessness .1 Childlessness by Level of Education
- Childlessness Among Men and Women
- Pathways to Childlessness
Note: The sample includes women and men aged 40 and over at the time of the interview. Thus, in Table 5.7 we present the results of an analysis of the degree of childlessness according to the number of siblings. Thus, in Table 5.9 we show the results of the analysis on levels of childlessness by marital and partnership status.
Unsurprisingly, men and women who were single at the time of the interview are much more likely to be childless than married women and men. Only a small proportion of childless men have been married for a long time (for a detailed study of the childlessness of married couples, see Rupp 2005).
Summary
Marriage and the partnership status in the above analyzes refer to the characteristics of the respondent on the date of the last interview. To improve the comparability of the plots, we drew a sample of men, women, childless individuals and individuals with children. The great majority of the men and women who eventually have children change their cohabitation into marriage in West Germany.
One of the limitations is that the findings were sensitive to education classification. Some of the findings we made in this paper were difficult to interpret.
Childlessness in Switzerland and Austria
Introduction
These levels and trends are similar to those in some Western European countries (UK, Germany, Netherlands) and some overseas developed countries (USA, Japan), but they are very different from Central and Eastern Europe, which has much lower childlessness rates. This chapter examines differences in fertility outcomes between subpopulations in the two countries, drawing on census and survey data. Specifically, we examine differences in childlessness rates by cohort, educational attainment, religion, migration background, and current place of residence in the country.
Institutional Setting and Data .1 Institutional Setting
- Data
In this chapter, the main data source for Switzerland is the complete census of the year 2000. In the census, both women and men were asked to report the number of children they had ever had or fathered. Women aged 16 and over were asked to indicate how many live births they had ever had.
Because of the way the census question was asked, there was some discrepancy in the proportion of respondents who said they were childless among comparable groups between the 1981 survey and subsequent surveys (Zeman 2011). 2 Census data on parity by level of education, origin and cohort are available in the Fertility and Education Cohort Database (Zeman et al. 2014).
Childlessness by Socio-economic Characteristics .1 Changing Levels of Childlessness by Birth Cohort
- Childlessness by Education
- Childlessness by Religion
- Childlessness by Country of Birth
- Geographical Variations in Childlessness and the Process of Concentration
The lowest level of childlessness in Austria, at around 12 %, was reached for women born in 1938. In the 2001 census, the level of childlessness for 45–54-year-old women was 20% for both Catholics and Protestants. The outcome of these factors in terms of childlessness is illustrated in Table 6.1 for Austria.
However, the high childlessness rates among women from former communist countries are surprising, as they were traditionally very low in these countries. As mentioned earlier, this discrepancy partly explains the higher childlessness rates for women than for men.
Fertility Intentions
The same opinion was expressed by women in the Swiss Family and Fertility Survey, that their main reason for not wanting to have a child was the problem of reconciling work and family (Coenen-Huther 2005). Of a sample of over 4,000 respondents for whom at least three survey waves were available and who were under the age of 38 in 2002, only 4.0.1 %) stated that they wished to be childless throughout the survey years. There was more stability in the responses of those who said they wanted to have at least one child, with over 57% of respondents falling into this category.
However, a significant minority sometimes express a desire to have children and other times say they do not (this includes some who actually have children). Approaching menopause can increase the desire to have a child in some women, or extinguish it in others.
Conclusions and Discussion
In Switzerland, the influence of not having a religion on childlessness varied across cohorts, with the largest effect seen in women born in the 1950s, for whom the influence of being non-religious was even greater than having a higher education. tion. Trends in the United States suggest that the future may be brighter than sometimes predicted, as childlessness has been declining and fertility has been increasing among the highly educated (Livingston 2015 and Frejka, ch. 8 in this volume). Acknowledgments This paper uses data collected in the Swiss Household Panel (SHP), based at the Swiss Center of Excellence in the Social Sciences FORS, University of Lausanne.
Funding for the submission of the 2000 Swiss census data and the FGS data from the SFSO was provided by the Institut de sciences sociales des religions contemporaines of the University of Lausanne. Legal Constraints on Marriage: Marriage and Inequality in Nineteenth-Century Austrian Tyrol.
Childlessness in Finland
- Introduction
- Data and Methods
- Register Data
- Survey Data
- General Trends in Fertility and Childlessness: Finland as the Northern European Outlier
- Increase in Childlessness in Unions
- Childlessness Increases Among the Less Educated
- Associations of Having a Spouse, Education and Childlessness
- Regional and Occupational Effects
- Low Voluntary Childlessness
- Delays in Planned Childbearing
- Infertility
- Conclusions: Many Shades of Childlessness
Among women born at the beginning of the twentieth century in Finland, the proportion without children was as high as 25% (Figure 7.1). In the Eurobarometer 2011 survey, the average ideal number of children indicated was 2.5 among Finns and 2.1 among Finns (Testa 2011). Of the childless Finns studied in the Relationships and Well-Being Survey, the proportion who were childless because they suffered from primary infertility was around 10% (Miettinen and Rotkirch 2008).
For decades, Finland has had one of the highest childlessness rates in Europe, among both men and women. Part of the explanation is that men and women in the least educated group are also less likely to have had a partner.
Childlessness in the United States
- Introduction
- Sources of Data
- The Cohort Fertility Tables
- The Fertility Supplement of the Current Population Survey
- The National Survey of Family Growth
- Levels of and Trends in Childlessness .1 Cohort Fertility Tables
- Fertility Supplements of the Current Population Survey
- The National Surveys of Family Growth (NSFG)
- Personal Characteristics and Attitudes of Childless Women
- Reasons and Motivations for Remaining Childless
- Black Childlessness: Trends and Explanations
The growing childless trend among black women from the 1950s stopped among the 1960s cohorts. One reason was the unique life history of the generation in their twenties and thirties. Childbearing delays were significantly more pronounced in economically more advanced countries in the Northeast.
However, the reasons for the apparent reversal in this trend in the early years of the twenty-first century remain to be explored. The resulting improvements in the health of the black population in turn led to a decline in childlessness.
