Conflicting Preferences: A Reason Fertility Tends to Be Too High or Too Low

Fertility has often seemed to be too high or too low, relative not only to social and economic goals, but also to reproductive preferences. In developing countries actual fertility has often been higher than desired family size, while in developed societies fertility tends to be below replacement level even though people generally say that they want at least two children. In explanations of fertility extremes, or of the discrepancies between desired and actual fertility, the effect of partners' holding different preferences has tended to be overlooked. Individual preferences expected to lead to replacement‐level reproduction may in combination generate substantially higher or lower fertility. In explaining such outcomes, a crucial question is what happens when spousal preferences diverge. Given that personal practices or social norms may systematically favor high or low preferences in the event of disagreement, chance alone will ensure that desired and actual fertility do not coincide.     

The effect of stepchildren on childbearing intentions and births

This article reports on a study of the effect of stepchildren (children from previous unions) on couples' fertility intentions and childbearing behavior using longitudinal data from the National Survey of Families and Households. The results indicated that stepchildren negatively affect childbearing intentions and childbearing risks. Intentions to have a child are weakened by one's own previous biological children and the previous biological children of one's current spouse or partner. This effect varies by the parenting configuration of the couple and gender of the respondent. Among couples with stepchildren, intentions remain high until each partner has had a biological child. Unlike women, men's previous biological children do not affect their intentions of having a child. Stepchildren exert a weak negative effect on couples' childbearing risks, and this effect is mediated by the couples' childbearing intentions. The findings suggest that stepchildren should be incorporated into future models of fertility.     

Sex of Previous Children and Intentions for Further Births in the United States, 1965-1976

The research reported herein, using samples of women interviewed in the 1965 and 1970 National Fertility Studies and the 1976 National Survey of Family Growth, shows that the sex of women’s previous children has an effect on their subsequent fertility intentions which differs at each parity. The persistence of that effect among women with two children in particular argues strongly for including sex of previous children as an independent variable in models of fertility intentions, since the decline in family size norms makes factors which affect the decision to have (or not have) a third child increasingly important.     

A theoretical analysis of antecedents of young couples’ fertility decisions and outcomes

Longitudinal survey data from 509 couples who at Time 1 interview had recently married or had their first child did not support the hypothesis that demographic factors influence fertility intentions, decisions, and outcomes only indirectly through their effects on attitudes and motivations. Husbands’ and wives’ attitudes exerted reciprocal influence on one another. However, while husbands’ sex-role traditionalism and motivation for parenthood strongly influenced wives’ traditionalism and motivation in the case of recently married couples, this pattern was reversed for riew parents. Birth control use was directly affected by wives’ fertility intentions, but not by husbands’ intentions. Difficulties in examining couple interaction variables such as relative power and the possible limitations of fitting these data to a complex theoretical model using LISREL are discussed.     

Intention and uncertainty at later stages of childbearing: the united states 1965 and 1970

While births may be dichotomous, fertility intentions are not inherently so. Intentions are predictions about the future and, as such, are couched in considerable uncertainty. Ignoring this uncertainty hides much of what could be learned from data on fertility intentions. This paper presents a model which allows analysis of the full range of intentions. After selecting a sample of women in the later stage of childbearing (e.g., those who intend fewer than two additional children) from the 1965and 1970 National Fertility Studies, it is shown that: (1) substantial portions of women at this stage of the reproductive life cycle were indeed uncertain of their parity-specific intention; (2) this certainty, like more firm intentions, varies by age and parity as the model predicts; and (3) there were significant shifts in the level of certainty between 1965 and 1970. Specifically, while intentions for third, fourth, and fifth births declined, more women “didn’t know” if they intended to have another child or not. Among those not intending another child, more seemed uncertain of this intention in 1970 than did comparable women in 1965. In contrast, those intending another child seemed more certain. These changes in intention and uncertainty indicate that the observed decline in intended parity was tentative. Post-1970 evidence suggests that this tentative decline has become an unequivocal one.     

Policies Addressing the Tempo Effect in Low‐Fertility Countries

The possible negative consequences of current low fertility levels are causing increasing concern, particularly in countries where the total fertility rate is below 1.5. Social inertia and self‐reinforcing processes may make it difficult to return to higher levels once fertility has been very low for some time, creating a possible “low‐fertility trap.” Policies explicitly addressing the fertility‐depressing effect of increases in the mean age at child‐bearing (the tempo effect) may be a way to raise period fertility to somewhat higher levels and help escape the “low‐fertility trap” before it closes. Reforms in the school system may affect the timing of childbearing by lowering the age at completion of education. A more efficient school system, which provides the same qualifications with a younger school‐leaving age, is potentially capable of increasing period fertility and hence exerting a rejuvenating effect on the age composition, even if the levels of cohort fertility remain unchanged. Such policies may also have a positive effect on completed cohort fertility.     

Couple childbearing desires, intentions, and births

Using new panel data from the National Surveys of Families and Households, I investigate the effects of wives’ and husbands’ childbearing desires on their spouses’ intentions, and the effects of spouses’ desires and intentions on subsequent births. The results show clearly that husbands’ desires and intentions influence couples’ births, with approximately equal force to that of wives’ desires and intentions. When couples disagreed about wanting a child, each partners’ intentions were shifted toward not having a child; and disagreement in desires or intentions were reflected in birth rates that were lower than average. These patterns were generally not different for couples with more or less traditional gender roles or attitudes.     

A Cognitive–Social Model of Fertility Intentions

We examine the use and value of fertility intentions against the backdrop of theory and research in the cognitive and social sciences. First, we draw on recent brain and cognition research to contextualize fertility intentions within a broader set of conscious and unconscious mechanisms that contribute to mental function. Next, we integrate this research with social theory. Our conceptualizations suggest that people do not necessarily have fertility intentions; they form them only when prompted by specific situations. Intention formation draws on the current situation and on schemas of childbearing and parenthood learned through previous experience, imbued by affect, and organized by self‐representation. Using this conceptualization, we review apparently discordant knowledge about the value of fertility intentions in predicting fertility. Our analysis extends and deepens existing explanations for the weak predictive validity of fertility intentions at the individual level and provides a social‐cognitive explanation for why intentions predict as well as they do. When focusing on the predictive power of intentions at the aggregate level, our conceptualizations lead us to focus on how social structures frustrate or facilitate intentions and how the structural environment contributes to the formation of reported intentions in the first place. Our analysis suggests that existing measures of fertility intentions are useful but to varying extents and in many cases despite their failure to capture what they seek to measure.     

Science,Modernity, and the Making of China's One‐Child Policy

China's one‐child‐per‐couple policy represents an extraordinary attempt to engineer national wealth, power, and global standing by drastically braking population growth. Despite the policy's external notoriety and internal might, its origins remain obscure. In the absence of scholarly research on this question, public discourse in the United States has been shaped by media representations portraying the policy as the product of a repressive communist regime. This article shows that the core ideas underlying the one‐child policy came instead from Western science, in particular from the Club of Rome's world‐in‐crisis work of the early 1970s. Drawing on research in science studies, the article analyzes the two notions lying at the policy's core—that China faced a virtual “population crisis” and that the one‐child policy was “the only solution” to it—as human constructs forged by specific groups of scientists working in particular, highly consequential contexts. It documents how the fundamentally political process of constituting population as an object of science and governance was then depoliticized by scientizing rhetorics that presented China's population crisis and its only solution as numerically describable, objective facts. By probing the human and historical character of population research, this article underscores the complexity of demographic knowledge‐making and the power of scientific practices in helping constitute demographic reality itself.     

Intended and Ideal Family Size in the United States, 1970–2002

Cross‐nationally, observed fertility is well below mean levels of reported ideal family size and also usually well below survey respondents' fertility desires and intentions. The United States is an exception. In this article we: (1) discuss the importance of fertility ideals and intentions for understanding observed fertility levels, (2) propose a model that can account for variable attitude‐behavior consistency, and (3) use this model as a framework to examine trends in American women's fertility ideals, intentions, and actual fertility. Our study uses data from the General Social Surveys and the Current Population Surveys. We ask whether preferences and intentions for moderate family sizes have eroded with time. The answer is remarkably clear: the dominant American ideals and intentions are for two or three children, and these preferences have persisted across the last three decades. The unusual aggregate correspondence between fertility intentions and behavior in the United States is explained by an apparent offsetting of factors that increase/decrease fertility relative to intentions.     

China's Below‐Replacement Fertility: Recent Trends and Future Prospects

Between 1970 and 1990, China experiencoed a rapid and sharp fertility decline—from total fertility rates of approximately six births to two. The degree to which Chinese fertility has continued to fall after 1990 is controversial. We use survey data from the 1997 National Population and Reproductive Health Survey and from the 2001 Reproductive Health and Family Planning Survey to document recent trends in Chinese fertility. Our estimates provide further evidence that China's fertility is well below‐replacement level at the turn of the twenty‐first century—with TFR levels of approximately 1.5 children per woman. Trends in parity‐specific cohort fertility by age also suggest below replacement completed fertility for cohorts still in the childbearing years. In the article's second section, we identify key components of low period fertility in order to frame our discussion of two questions: 1) in what ways is Chinese low fertility different from/similar to that in other low‐fertility countries? And 2) what are the likely future trends in Chinese fertility?     

Changes in the Quantum of Russian Fertility During the 1980s and Early 1990s

To investigate whether Russia's dramatic fertility changes pre‐ and post‐Soviet times were due primarily to tempo effects, as has been argued recently, or to quantum effects, this study standardizes for factors that distort conventional fertility indexes. A time series spanning 1978–93 of period parity‐progression ratios for the Russian Federation is constructed applying the PADTFR technique, which takes into account age, parity, and time elapsed since the birth of the previous child, to data from the Russian micro census of February 1994 (2.8 million maternity histories). Both the fertility rise of the 1980s and the fertility fall of the early 1990s are found to be primarily due to changes in the probability of a second birth. The impact of tempo on the conventional TFR is significant, but of relatively minor magnitude in comparison to changes in the quantum of fertility. The social and economic context in which the fertility change took place is described.     

Fertility Intentions and Residential Relocations

This research addresses the question of whether fertility intentions (before conception) are associated with residential relocations and the distance of the relocation. We empirically tested this using data from two birth cohorts (aged 24–28 and 34–38 in the first survey wave) of the German Family Panel (pairfam) and event history analysis. Bivariate analyses showed that coupled individuals relocated at a higher rate if they intended to have a(nother) child. We found substantial heterogeneity according to individuals’ age and parental status, particularly for outside-town relocations. Childless individuals of average age at family formation—a highly mobile group—relocated at a lower rate if they intended to have a child. In contrast, older individuals who already had children—the least-mobile group—relocated at a higher rate if they intended to have another child. Multivariate analyses show that these associations are largely due to adjustments in housing and other living conditions. Our results suggest that anticipatory relocations (before conception) to adapt to growing household size are importantly nuanced by the opportunities and rationales of couples to adjust their living conditions over the life course. Our research contributes to the understanding of residential mobility as a by-product of fertility decisions and, more broadly, evidences that intentions matter and need to be considered in the analysis of family life courses.     

Muslim and Non‐Muslim Differences in Female Autonomy and Fertility: Evidence from Four Asian Countries

On the basis of research on paired Muslim and non‐Muslim communities selected in India, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines, the authors test the hypothesis that greater observed Muslim pronatalism can be explained by less power or lower autonomy among Muslim women. Indeed, wives in the Muslim communities, compared to the non‐Muslim ones: 1) had more children, 2) were more likely to desire additional children, and 3) if they desired no more children, were less likely to be using contraception. However, the authors do not find that Muslim communities consistently score lower on dimensions of women's power/autonomy. Thus, aggregate‐level comparisons provide little evidence of a relationship between lower autonomy and higher fertility. Individual‐level multivariate analysis of married women in these paired settings similarly suggests that women's autonomy differentials do not account for the higher fertility, demand for more children, and less use of contraception among Muslim wives. These results suggest that explanations for Muslim/non‐Muslim fertility differences lie elsewhere.     

Biodemographic modeling of the links between fertility motivation and fertility outcomes in the NLSY79

In spite of long-held beliefs that traits related to reproductive success tend to become fixed by evolution with little or no genetic variation, there is now considerable evidence that the natural variation of fertility within populations is genetically influenced and that a portion of that influence is related to the motivational precursors to fertility. We conduct a two-stage analysis to examine these inferences in a time-ordered multivariate context. First, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979, and LISREL analysis, we develop a structural equation model in which five hypothesized motivational precursors to fertility, measured in 1979–1982, predict both a child-timing and a child-number outcome, measured in 2002. Second, having chosen two time-ordered sequences of six variables from the SEM to represent our phenotypic models, we use Mx to conduct both univariate and multivariate behavioral genetic analyses with the selected variables. Our results indicate that one or more genes acting within a gene network have additive effects that operate through child-number desires to affect both the timing of the next child born and the final number of children born, that one or more genes acting through a separate network may have additive effects operating through gender role attitudes to produce downstream effects on the two fertility outcomes, and that no genetic variance is associated with either child-timing intentions or educational intentions.     

Fertility desires and fertility: Hers,his, and theirs

The relationship between desired and achieved fertility may be misspecified by excluding husbands' fertility desires or by confounding effects of shared desires with the resolution of conflicting desires. Using couple data from the classic Princeton Fertility Surveys, we find relatively large husband effects on fertility outcomes as well as unique effects of spousal disagreement. Wives and husbands were equally likely to achieve fertility desires, and disagreeing couples experienced fertility rates midway between couples who wanted the same smaller or larger number of children. These conditions do not hold, however, when we include willingness to delay births for economic mobility as part of the measure of fertility desires. Among couples who both wanted a third child, only husbands' willingness to delay births had significant negative effects on birth rates.     

The Correspondence Between Fertility Intentions and Behavior in the United States

Using data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we describe the correspondence between intended family size and observed fertility for US men and women in the 1957–64 birth cohorts. Mean fertility intentions calculated from reports given in the mid‐20s modestly overstate completed fertility. But discrepancies between stated intent and actual fertility are common—the stated intent at age 24 (for both women and men) is more likely to miss than to match completed fertility. We focus on factors that predict which women and men will have fewer or more children than intended. Consistent with life‐course arguments, those unmarried, childless, or (for women) still in school at approximately age 24 were most likely to underachieve their intended parity (i.e., had fewer children than intended at age 24). We discuss how such discrepancies between intentions and behavior may cumulate to produce sizable cross‐group fertility differences.     

Effects of Childhood Mortality and Morbidity on the Fertility Transition in sub‐Saharan Africa

Child mortality rates have fallen substantially in developing countries since 1960. The expected fertility decline has followed only weakly in sub‐Saharan Africa compared to other recent and historic demographic transitions. Disease and anthropometric data suggest that morbidity remains prevalent in Africa despite child survival improvements. The uniquely high infectious disease burden among children in Africa reduces population health and diminishes the returns to human capital investment, thwarting the quantity–quality tradeoff for children that typically accompanies the mortality transition. Individual‐level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys are used to show that persistent morbidity has weakened the positive relationship between child mortality and total fertility rates throughout the region, slowing Africa's demographic transition.     

生育一孩弱化二孩生育意愿吗？——基于北京市“单独”家庭的考察

本文使用北京市西城区2013年生育意愿调查数据,基于不同的生育意愿测度指标,采用描述分析和回归分析方法检验城市＂单独＂家庭中生育一孩对二孩生育意愿的作用,并借助倾向值分析方法控制生育状况的自选择问题,从而使得研究结论更具稳健性和可靠性。结果表明,城市＂单独＂家庭的二孩生育意愿并不低迷,生育一孩能够强化育龄妇女的二孩生育意愿,而且生育状况的作用在生育意愿的众多影响因素中较为突出。上述结果需要在生育意愿的评估和生育政策的制定中有所关注。     

Economic Insecurity and the Fertility Intentions of Italian Women with One Child

The present study addresses the issue of economic insecurity and its relationship with the reproductive plans of 5,358 Italian women in couples who have recently had their first child. Data were sourced from the ISTAT Sample Survey on Births, 2005 edition. This article’s originality lies in the conceptualization of economic insecurity and the investigation of its effects on fertility intentions. We propose to capture economic insecurity by considering both the insecurity associated to the two partners’ employment status and a variety of aspects that contribute to the household’s ability to cope with possible unpredictable future events. Then, we investigate whether and how economic insecurity shapes the fertility intentions of women over their entire reproductive life span. With specific respect to women who intend to have one additional child only, we also observe the effect of economic insecurity on their intention to give birth sooner (i.e., within the next 3 years) or later. Our data show the existence of a critical factor in the passage from the generic fertility intentions to the contingent plan to have a child in the next 3 years: only half of women with one child who intend to follow the two-child family model feel ready to plan to have a second child in the next 3 years. The study also reinforces an argument that is frequently made: fertility intentions over the entire lifetime are less conditioned upon contingent constraints, and are often more closely related to individual traits and/or preferences.