Intergenerational Transmission of Age at First Birth in the United States: Evidence from Multiple Surveys

It is well established that the timing of childbearing is transmitted from parents to children in the United States. However, little is known about how the intergenerational link has changed over time and under structural and ideological transformations associated with fertility behaviors. This study first considers changes across two birth cohorts from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) in the extent to which parents’ age at first birth is transmitted to their children. The first cohort includes individuals born during the late 1950s through the early 1960s (NLSY79), while the second includes individuals born in the early 1980s (NLSY97). Results from discrete-time event history analyses indicate that the intergenerational transmission of age at first birth significantly increased for both daughters and sons. These results were confirmed by analyses of data from three cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth spanning the same time period. Over this period, age at first childbirth became increasingly younger for children born to teenage mothers and increasingly older for those born to mothers who began parenthood after age 25. These patterns have important implications for the reproductive polarization hypothesis.     

Family influences on family size preferences

Several studies have demonstrated important effects of parents’ childbearing behavior on their children’s childbearing preferences and behavior. The study described here advances our understanding of these family influences by expanding the theoretical model to include parental preferences, siblings’ behavior, and changes in children’s preferences through early adulthood. Using intergenerational panel data from mothers and their children, we test the effects of both mothers’ preferences for their own fertility and mothers’ preferences for their children’s fertility. Although both types of maternal preferences influence children’s childbearing preferences, mothers’ preferences for their children’s behavior have the stronger and more proximate effects. Mothers’ preferences continue to influence their children’s preferences through early adulthood; siblings’ fertility is an additional determinant of children’s family size preferences.     

Intergenerational earnings mobility in Japan among sons and daughters: levels and trends

This paper estimates the extent of intergenerational income mobility in Japan among sons and daughters born between 1935 and 1975. Our estimates rely on a two-sample instrumental variables approach using representative data from the Japanese Social Stratification and Mobility surveys, collected between 1965 and 2005. Father’s income is predicted on the basis of a rich set of variables, and we discuss changes in the Japanese earnings structure for cohorts born between the early 1900s and the 1960s. Our main results indicate that the intergenerational income elasticity (IGE) for both sons and daughters in Japan lies around 0.35, which is an intermediate value, by international standards. We discuss the sensitivity of the IGE to using either personal or family income as the income variable for both fathers and children. We also examine changes across cohorts in the IGE. Results indicate that intergenerational mobility has been roughly stable over the last decades.     

Does teenage childbearing reduce investment in human capital?

This paper estimates the causal effect of teenage childbearing on educational attainment using two cohorts of Australian twins and their relatives. Our main finding is that the negative effect of teenage childbearing on educational attainment appears to be small. We find no difference in educational attainment between teen mothers and their identical twin sisters. Data on the relatives of the twins enable us to compare a teen mother with both her twin sister and her other sibling sisters. When twin sisters are used as a control group instead of sibling sisters, the estimated difference in educational attainment is much smaller.     

劳动力外流下农村家庭代际支持性别分工研究

利用西安交通大学人口与发展研究所2001年、2003年和2006年"安徽省老年人生活福利状况跟踪调查数据",采用随机效应的Logistic模型,从老年父母和成年子女两个角度研究农村老年人家庭代际支持性别分工机制的变化。结果发现,农村老年人家庭代际交换仍然符合合作群体模式,由于不同性别在家庭中的角色和性别分工不同,老年父亲从子女外出中直接获益更多,老年母亲更多地是获得补偿性支持;儿子仍然在家庭养老中承担主要责任,女儿得到老年父母帮助时提供的补偿性支持更多,劳动力外流促使儿子和女儿对老年父母代际支持的性别差异缩小,女儿在家庭养老中的地位和作用显著提高。     

Beyond Transmission: Intergenerational Patterns of Family Formation Among Middle-Class American Families

Research about parental effects on family behavior focuses on intergenerational transmission: that is, whether children show the same family behavior as their parents. This focus potentially overemphasizes similarity and obscures heterogeneity in parental effects on family behavior. In this study, we make two contributions. First, instead of focusing on isolated focal events, we conceptualize parents’ and their children’s family formation holistically as the process of union formation and childbearing between ages 15 and 40. We then discuss mechanisms likely to shape these intergenerational patterns. Second, beyond estimating average transmission effects, we innovatively apply multichannel sequence analysis to dyadic sequence data on middle-class American families from the Longitudinal Study of Generations (LSOG; N = 461 parent-child dyads). The results show three salient intergenerational family formation patterns among this population: a strong transmission, a moderated transmission, and an intergenerational contrast pattern. We examine what determines parents’ and children’s likelihood to sort into a specific intergenerational pattern. For middle-class American families, educational upward mobility is a strong predictor of moderated intergenerational transmission, whereas close emotional bonds between parents and children foster strong intergenerational transmission. We conclude that intergenerational patterns of family formation are generated at the intersection of macro-structural change and family internal psychological dynamics.     

Gender preference and birth spacing in matlab,Bangladesh

Gender preference, particularly son preference, is believed to sustain high fertility in many Asian countries, but previous research shows unclear effects. We examine and compare gender-preference effects on fertility in two otherwise comparable populations in Bangladesh that differ markedly in their access to and use of contraception. We expect, and find, stronger effects of gender preference in the population that has more access to contraception and higher levels of contraceptive use. Thus gender preference may emerge as a significant barrier to further national family planning efforts in Bangladesh. We find that if a woman has at least one daughter, the risk of a subsequent birth is related negatively to the number of sons. Women with no daughters also experience a higher risk of having a subsequent birth; this finding suggests that there is also some preference for daughters. Son preference is strong in both the early and later stages of family formation, but women also want to have at least one daughter after having several sons.     

The Educational Consequences of Teen Childbearing

A huge literature shows that teen mothers face a variety of detriments across the life course, including truncated educational attainment. To what extent is this association causal? The estimated effects of teen motherhood on schooling vary widely, ranging from no discernible difference to 2.6 fewer years among teen mothers. The magnitude of educational consequences is therefore uncertain, despite voluminous policy and prevention efforts that rest on the assumption of a negative and presumably causal effect. This study adjudicates between two potential sources of inconsistency in the literature—methodological differences or cohort differences—by using a single, high-quality data source: namely, The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. We replicate analyses across four different statistical strategies: ordinary least squares regression; propensity score matching; and parametric and semiparametric maximum likelihood estimation. Results demonstrate educational consequences of teen childbearing, with estimated effects between 0.7 and 1.9 fewer years of schooling among teen mothers. We select our preferred estimate (0.7), derived from semiparametric maximum likelihood estimation, on the basis of weighing the strengths and limitations of each approach. Based on the range of estimated effects observed in our study, we speculate that variable statistical methods are the likely source of inconsistency in the past. We conclude by discussing implications for future research and policy, and recommend that future studies employ a similar multimethod approach to evaluate findings.     

Intergenerational earnings mobility and divorce

This paper examines the potential effect of marital disruption on intergenerational earnings mobility. We observe the earnings of children born in 1960 and 1970 along with their biological fathers and mothers. The earnings mobility between sons and daughters relative to the earnings of their mothers and fathers is estimated. Our results suggest that divorce is associated with increased mobility, except between mothers’ and daughters’ earnings. Transition matrices reveal that the direction of the mobility is negative; children of divorced parents tend to move downward in the earnings distribution compared to children from intact families. Finally, we utilize information on the earnings mobility of siblings in dissolved families who grew up when the family was intact. The difference between pre- and post-divorce siblings is in turn compared with sibling differences in intact families.     

The long-term impact of parents' childbearing decisions on children's self-esteem

We examine the long-term impact of parents' childbearing decisions on children's self-esteem. We focus on subjective aspects of the home environment in the creation of children's internalized sense of self-worth. Unique 23-year family panel data combining measures of mothers' childbearing, mothers' childbearing intentions, and children's self-esteem allow us to examine the overall links between parents' childbearing and children's self-esteem. The results demonstrate that parents' childbearing intentions can have a significant long-term impact on their children's self-esteem. Children who were unintended by their mothers have significantly lower self-esteem 23 years later. Our findings indicate that giving birth to an unintended child can have a long-term negative impact on subjective aspects of the child's well-being, at least in terms of self-esteem. Unintended childbearing has received an increasing amount of research attention in recent years.     

Disparities in Children’s Family Experiences by Mother’s Socioeconomic Status: The Case of Finland

A well-known argument claims that socioeconomic differentials in children’s family structures have become increasingly important in shaping child outcomes and the resources available to children in developed societies. One assumption is that differentials are comparatively small in Nordic welfare states. Our study examines how children’s experiences of family structures and family dynamics vary by their mother’s educational attainment in Finland. Based on register data on the childbearing and union histories of women in Finland born from 1969 onwards, we provide life-table estimates of children’s (N?=?64,162) experiences of family dissolution, family formation, and family structure from ages 0–15 years, stratified by mother’s education level at the child’s birth. We find huge socioeconomic disparities in children’s experiences of family structures and transitions. Compared to children of highly educated mothers, children of mothers with low levels of education are almost twice as likely to be born in cohabitation and four times as likely to be born to a lone mother. They are also much more likely to experience further changes in family structure—particularly parental separation. On average, children of low-educated mothers spend just half of their childhood years living with both their parents, whereas those of high-educated mothers spend four-fifths of their childhood with both parents. The sociodemographic inequalities among children in Nordic welfare states clearly deserve more scholarly attention.     

Immigration to the UK from High‐Fertility Countries: Intergenerational Adaptation and Fertility Convergence

The fertility of immigrants' children increasingly shapes the ethnic diversity of the population in Western Europe. However, few data are available on the fertility patterns of immigrants and their offspring. This article provides new fertility estimates of immigrants and immigrants' children by ethnic group in the United Kingdom that may provide better‐informed fertility assumptions for future population projection models. The impact of migration‐specific tempo effects on the period TFR of immigrants is analyzed. Among the results, intergenerational fertility transitions strongly contribute both to fertility convergence between ethnic groups and to fertility “assimilation” or “intergenerational adaptation” to the UK mainstream childbearing behavior. Ethnic fertility convergence, particularly marked for populations originating from high‐fertility countries, reflects in part decreasing fertility in sending countries and in part intergenerational adaptation to the UK mainstream. Higher educational enrollment of the daughters of immigrants may partly explain their relatively lower fertility.     

Do smart parents raise smart children? The intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities

Complementing prior research on income and educational mobility, we examine the intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities. We find that individuals’ cognitive skills are positively related to their parents’ abilities, despite controlling for educational attainment and family background. Differentiating between mothers’ and fathers’ IQ transmission, we find different effects on the cognition of sons and daughters. Cognitive skills that are based on past learning are more strongly transmitted between generations than skills that are related to innate abilities. Our findings are not compatible with a pure genetic model but rather point to the importance of parental investments for children’s cognitive outcomes.     

The effect of divorce on intergenerational transfers: New evidence

This paper draws on new data on intergenerational transfers of time and money that were collected in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We use these data to examine the effects of divorce on these transfers. We find that the timing of divorce is critical. Fathers and mothers involved in late divorces have similar levels of transfers with their adult children, while divorce during a child’s childhood years increases transfers with mothers and sharply lowers them with fathers. Somewhat surprisingly, we find no evidence that divorced fathers who paid child support are more likely to be involved in intergenerational transfers than those who did not pay child support.     

Happiness and Childbearing Across Europe

Using happiness as a well-being measure and comparative data from the European social survey we focus in this paper on the link between happiness and childbearing across European countries. The analysis motivates from the recent lows in fertility in many European countries and that economic wellbeing measures are problematic when considering childbearing. We find significant country differences, though the direct association between happiness and childbearing is modest. However, partnership status plays an important role for both men and women. Working fathers are always happier, whereas working mothers are not, though mothers?? happiness tends to increase with household income.     

UNIVERSAL VERSUS ECONOMICALLY POLARIZED CHANGE IN AGE AT FIRST BIRTH: A FRENCH-BRITISH COMPARISON

France and the United Kingdom represent two contrasting institutional models for the integration of employment and motherhood, respectively the 'universalistic' regime type that offers subsidized child-care and maternity-leave benefits to women at all income levels, and the 'means-testing' regime type that mainly offers income-tested benefits for single mothers. Using the two countries as comparative case studies, we develop and test the hypothesis that the socio-economic gradient of fertility timing has become increasingly mediated by family policy. We hypothesize and find increasing polarization in age at first birth by pre-childbearing occupation between the 1980s and 1990s in the U.K. but not in France. Early first childbearing persisted in the U.K. only among women in low-skill occupations, while shifts towards increasingly late first births occurred in clerical/secretarial occupations and above. Increases in age at first birth occurred across all occupations in France, but this was still much earlier on average than for all but low-skill British mothers.     

Childbearing Across Partnerships in Australia,the United States,Norway, and Sweden

This article compares mothers’ experience of having children with more than one partner in two liberal welfare regimes (the United States and Australia) and two social democratic regimes (Sweden and Norway). We use survey-based union and birth histories in Australia and the United States and data from national population registers in Norway and Sweden to estimate the likelihood of experiencing childbearing across partnerships at any point in the childbearing career. We find that births with new partners constitute a substantial proportion of all births in each country we study. Despite quite different arrangements for social welfare, the determinants of childbearing across partnerships are very similar. Women who had their first birth at a very young age or who are less well-educated are most likely to have children with different partners. The educational gradient in childbearing across partnerships is also consistently negative across countries, particularly in contrast to educational gradients in childbearing with the same partner. The risk of childbearing across partnerships increased dramatically in all countries from the 1980s to the 2000s, and educational differences also increased, again, in both liberal and social democratic welfare regimes.     

State-level Welfare Policies and Nonmarital Subsequent Childbearing

Using discrete time event history analyses of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we examine the association between state-level welfare waiver policies implemented before the 1996 welfare reform legislation and the risk of a nonmarital subsequent birth. Our study makes a unique contribution to the existing literature by using a national-level sample of unmarried mothers who ever received welfare. This high-risk sample represents the women of most interest to policymakers, as it is the exact group to whom welfare reform is targeted—welfare mothers at risk of having nonmarital additional births. The state policies we study include: family cap, earnings disregard, work exemptions, work requirements, and sanctions. We conclude that, although reducing the number of nonmarital births is a key goal of welfare reform, state-established welfare waiver policies do not have any influence on women’s childbearing behaviors in this sample, net of women’s individual characteristics and state economic environments. Even the family cap policy, which was designed for the sole purpose of reducing additional births, has no significant association with nonmarital subsequent childbearing. Instead, personal characteristics, not public policies, are stronger determinants of women’s childbearing decisions. Age, race/ethnicity, marital status, number of previous children, education level, and welfare receipt are significantly associated with nonmarital subsequent births. Overall, this paper contributes to an expanding body of research that shows minimal effects of welfare waivers on fertility. Our work suggests that more targeted policies are necessary to be able to influence individual family formation behaviors.     

The Evolution of Family Complexity from the Perspective of Nonmarital Children

We document the incidence and evolution of family complexity from the perspective of children. Following a cohort of firstborn children whose mothers were not married at the time of their birth, we consider family structure changes over the first 10 years of the child’s life—considering both full and half-siblings who are coresidential or who live in another household. We rely on detailed longitudinal administrative data from Wisconsin that include information on the timing of subsequent births to the mother and father, and detailed information on earnings, child support, and welfare. We find that 60% of firstborn children of unmarried mothers have at least one half-sibling by age 10. Our results highlight the importance of having fertility information for both fathers and mothers: estimates of the proportion of children with half-siblings would be qualitatively lower if we had fertility information on only one parent. Complex family structures are more likely for children of parents who are younger or who have low earnings and for those in larger urban areas. Children who have half-siblings on their mother’s side are also more likely to have half-siblings on their father’s side, and vice versa, contributing to very complex family structures—and potential child support arrangements—for some children.