At the end of the childbearing years, childlessness is a fixed characteristic. First, we study whether women state childless expectations and how these expectations change over women’s reproductive careers. Specifically, it focuses on three aspects of the process of remaining childless, all three pertaining to the development of childless expectations. This paper also complements the existing childlessness literature. This approach stresses the interaction of schemas, material constraints, and individual identity in producing the patterns observed in the data and challenges rational choice approaches to fertility ( Bachrach and Morgan 2013 Morgan and Bachrach 2011). What are the causes of increased childlessness? Are present day levels of, and variation in childlessness a manifestation of individual preferences to avoid childbearing? Or is childlessness more frequently the result of contextual/material factors (potentially anchored in institutional arrangements) that impede fulfillment of motherhood plans, e.g., conflicts between family life, career aspirations, and leisure activities? These questions are fundamentally sociological and we approach them from a duality of structure perspective (see Sewell 1992, 2005) using the theory of conjunctional action (TCA, Johnson-Hanks et al.
Average woman unexpected expectations full#
These smaller cohorts impact a full set of age-graded institutions such as schools, the labor force, union formation, and social security. 2017) and a decrease in birth cohort sizes.
Combined with smaller family size, childlessness also contributes to a decline of fertility levels in the United States ( Martin et al. At the institutional level, the centrality of parenthood to both the family and to gender identities has been weakened by the growing prevalence and normative acceptance of fertility postponement and childless lifestyles. Once perceived as the final step in the passage to adulthood ( Elder 1975), parenting is increasingly an optional part of this transition. In addition, increases in temporary and permanent childlessness fundamentally alter the meaning of parenthood as a life course marker. career or leisure activities, which translates into greater individualization of life course biographies ( Giddens 1991). These child-free years create space and opportunity for exploration of non-familial social roles, through e.g. These elevated levels of childlessness are part of a broad shift in family formation patterns that have consequences at the individual, family, and societal level.Īt the individual level, fertility postponement and childlessness expand the proportion of the life course that men and women spend without children. In the United States, 2014 data show that one in seven women aged 40–44 have not had any children and that almost a half of women aged 18 to 39 were childless (IPUMS CPS, Flood et al. Permanent and temporary childlessness in industrialized countries are on the rise ( Dye 2010 Rowland 2007 Sobotka 2017). We thus conclude that the effects of socio-demographic and situational factors on childless expectations are channeled predominantly through repeated childbearing postponement. However, net of this postponement, few variables commonly associated with childlessness are associated with reports of a childless expectation. Longitudinal logistic regression analysis of these childless expectations indicates a strong effect of childbearing postponement among the increasingly selective group of childless women. In addition, despite their variability over time, childless expectations strongly predict permanent childlessness, regardless of the age when respondents offer them. These findings reaffirm that it is problematic to assign expected and unexpected childlessness labels to the reproductive experience of childless women. 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. 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. One-quarter of women in the NLSY-79 cohort ever reported an expectation for childlessness but only 14.8 percent of women remain childless. 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.
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