Family sizes of children and family sizes of women

This paper demonstrates the relation that obtains between the average family size of women and the average family size of offspring of those women. It estimates the value of these two measures for cohorts of American women aged 45–49 in various years from 1890 to 1970. It shows that children born during the post-war baby boom actually derived from smaller families than those born during the low-fertility 1930’s; that under current patterns a woman would have to bear an average of almost two children fewer than were borne by her mother merely to keep population fertility rates constant from generation to generation; and that average family size for nonwhite children exceeds that for white by 50 percent, although the racial difference in family sizes of women is only 19 percent.     

On Postponement and Birth Intervals

Much of the literature on fertility transition presumes that birth control is practiced either to limit family size or to space births. This article argues that women also use birth control to postpone pregnancy. Postponement is not synonymous with spacing. It arises when women delay their next birth for indefinite periods for reasons unrelated to the age of their youngest child, but without deciding not to have any more children. Postponement has a distinctive impact on the shape of birth‐interval distributions that differs from the impacts of family size limitation, birth spacing, or a mixture of the two behaviors. Some populations, such as that in South Africa, have developed fertility regimes characterized by birth intervals far longer than can be accounted for by birth spacing. Postponement of further childbearing that eventually becomes permanent may be an important driver of the transition to lower fertility in sub‐Saharan Africa.     

Race,Remarital Status,and Infertility in 1910: More Evidence of Multiple Causes

The dominant approach to studying historical race-related fertility differences has been to limit samples to first-married and younger women. We argue that studying historical race-related fertility differences in the context of remarriage is also important: remarriage and fertility patterns are both rooted in the biosocial conditions that produce racial disparities in health. We employ a multiple causes framework that attributes variation in fertility patterns to voluntary limitation and involuntary factors (infecundity/subfecundity). We use data from the 1910 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series and estimate zero-inflated negative binomial models that simultaneously distinguish those who are infecund (vs. fecund) and estimate the number of remarital births among the fecund. Our approach allows us to evaluate historical remarital (in)fertility differences, accounting for marital, socioeconomic, and geographic influences on fecundity and fertility, while empirically accounting for the influence of children “missing” from the household due to mortality and fostering/aging out. Consistent with past studies that emphasized poorer African American health as a major influence on involuntary infertility, we find that African American women were more likely than white women to be in the always-zero (infecund) group and to have fewer remarital births. Supplemental analyses nuance these findings but indicate that these results are robust. Overall, we find support for a multiple-causes perspective: while the findings are consistent with the adoption of deliberate fertility control among urban and higher-status women at higher parities, remarital fertility differences in 1910 also reflected greater infecundity/subfecundity among subgroups of women, especially African American women.     

Economic considerations in family growth decisions

Abstract Examination of the fertility patterns of a sample of white Detroit couples at selected stages of the family life cycle indicates that, in a large American metropolis, family income is more closely related to the time when a family is formed and has its children than to the number of children it expects to have. In a longitudinal study, current income is strongly related to the timing of demographic events-the age at marriage, whether pre-maritally pregnant, the time interval from marriage to a given parity, and fertility during a two-year follow-up period. This paper also explores the hypothesis that a family's evaluation of its economic position and the choices it makes about important family expenditures has a relation to fertility apart from the family's objective current income level. Couples who consider their income adequate for their needs or relatively greater than that of their friends or peers, and those who expect substantial increases in the future, tend to expect more children than those who do not. Small but consistent differences obtain over the parities studied. Variables indexing alternative family expenditure patterns, such as cars, or savings for college education for children, are associated with lower family size expectations and longer spacing patterns.     

The World Fertility Survey: charting global childbearing

Interviewing some 350,000 women in 42 developing countries and 20 developed countries representing nearly 40% of the world's population, the World Fertility Survey (WFS) is in a unique position to document the historic 1970s slowdown in global population growth. This Bulletin describes efforts begun in 1972 to ensure high quality, internationally comparable, accessible data, the data's importance for policymakers, planners and researchers, and major findings available by early 1982 from directly assisted WFS surveys in 29 developing countries and contraceptive use data from WFS-type surveys in 16 developed countries. Marital fertility has declined in all developing regions except Africa but still averages from 4.6 children/woman in Latin America to 6.7 in Africa, while preferred family size ranges from 3.0 children in Turkey to 8.9 in Senegal--far above the average 2.2-2.5 children/woman needed to end developing countries' population growth in the long run. However, women ages 15-19 prefer nearly 2 children fewer than the oldest women ages 45-49; 3.8 vs. 5.7 on the average. Nearly 1/2 (48%) of married women surveyed in 27 countreis said they wanted no more children. Preventing all unwanted births would reduce birth rates up to 15 births/1000 population in these countries. Overall, 32% of married, fecund women in developing countries are using contraception compared to an average 72% in 16 developed countries. Education, literacy, and more available family planning services increase contraceptive use. Age at marriage is rising in Asia, but this factor alone has little effect on fertility. Infant mortality is higher in many developing countries than previously thought. Breastfeeding is an important restraint on fertility in most developing countries but is declining among more educated, employed, and urban women which could raise fertility if not compensated for by gains in contraceptive use.     

From natural fertility to family limitation: The onset of fertility transition in a sample of German villages

Utilizing data from a sample of German village genealogies, it is possible to document the changes in reproductive patterns on the family level that started to take place in Germany during the nineteenth century and formed the basis for the secular decline in fertility which eventually encompassed the entire country. One striking finding from this study was the substantial diversity among the small sample of villages in terms of the timing of the emergence of family limitation. While couples in all villages who married during the last half of the eighteenth century appeared to be characterized predominantly by natural fertility the emergence of family limitation began as early as the turn of the nineteenth century in some places and as late as the end of the nineteenth century in others. Occupational differentials with respect to family limitation were also examined. There is little evidence that changes in birth spacing played an important part in the initial phase of the fertility trnsition. Rather, the underlying process appears to involve a change from fertility patterns that were characterized by the absence of parity-dependent control to one in which attempts to terminate childbearing in response to the number of children already born becomes widespread.     

Demographic aspects of fertility in Thailand

Abstract Data from a national rural and urban sample survey are analysed in order to examine various demographic aspects of fertility in Thailand. Marital fertility rates found for Thailand are among the highest in Asia. Particularly noteworthy is the persistence of high fertility at older ages of childbearing for rural women. Cumulative fertility shows a pronounced relationship with age at marriage and current marital status. Women who marry at an older age or who experience disruption of their marriages are clearly more likely to have fewer children ever born. Differences in both current and cumulative fertility are strongly associated with residence. Rural women who constitute the vast majority of Thai women, experience the highest fertility, Bangkok-Thonburi women experience the lowest fertility and provincial urban women are characterized by an intermediate fertility level which is closer, however, to the experience of their counterparts in the capital than in the countryside. Rural-urban fertility differences are mitigated but by no means eliminated by differences in infant mortality. In both rural and urban areas a positive association between cumulative fertility and infant morality is evident. Breast-feeding, commonly practised for extended periods-among both rural and urban Thai women, undoubtedly serves to some extent as an intervening variable in this relationship. A comparison of current fertility with cumulative fertility strongly suggests that a decline in marital fertility has been under way recently among urban women, especially those residing in the capital, but not at all among rural women. Although it seems safe to assume that the urban fertility decline results in large part from an increasing use of contraception among urban women, those still in the reproductive ages who were using or had previously used birth control were characterized by higher cumulative fertility than women who had never practised contraception. Evidently couples resort to family planning only late in the family building process after they have already achieved or exceeded the number of children they wish to have.     

Marital dissolution,remarriage, and childbearing

Earlier models of fertility hypothesize that marital dissolution and remarriage influence subsequent childbearing. This issue is examined by comparing the fertility of those in disrupted marriages with that of those in stable marriages. The results indicate that, by transferring women into a nonmarried status, marital dissolution decreases childbearing. The data also suggest that discord reduces fertility even before separation occurs—separated women had reduced fertility during the two years just before separation. It was found that marital dissolution without remarriage operates to truncate childbearing, thus decreasing family size. Dissolution followed by remarriage, however, lengthens the childbearing span of whites and has no influence on average family size; remarrying white women are able to make up for the childbearing lost between marriages. For nonwhites, we found that dissolution and remarriage increase the average time to childbirth, but, even more importantly, these events greatly decrease the number of children born.     

Intensive Parenting: Fertility and Breastfeeding Duration in the United States

Using 30 years of longitudinal data from a nationally representative cohort of women, we study the association between breastfeeding duration and completed fertility, fertility expectations, and birth spacing. We find that women who breastfeed their first child for five months or longer are a distinct group. They have more children overall and higher odds of having three or more children rather than two, compared with women who breastfeed for shorter durations or not at all. Expected fertility is associated with initiating breastfeeding but not with how long mothers breastfeed. Thus, women who breastfeed longer do not differ significantly from other breastfeeding women in their early fertility expectations. Rather, across the life course, these women achieve and even exceed their earlier fertility expectations. Women who breastfeed for shorter durations (1–21 weeks) are more likely to fall short of their expected fertility than to achieve or exceed their expectations, and they are significantly less likely than women who breastfeed for longer durations (≥22 weeks) to exceed their expected fertility. In contrast, women who breastfeed longer are as likely to exceed as to achieve their earlier expectations, and the difference between their probability of falling short versus exceeding their fertility expectations is relatively small and at the boundary of statistical significance (p = .096). These differences in fertility are not explained by differences in personal and family resources, including family income or labor market attachment. Our findings suggest that breastfeeding duration may serve as a proxy for identifying a distinct approach to parenting. Women who breastfeed longer have reproductive patterns quite different than their socioeconomic position would predict. They both have more children and invest more time in those children.     

Women’s Job Quality Across Family Life Stages: An Analysis of Female Employees Across 27 European Countries

There is little empirical evidence on how working conditions affect women’s employment and fertility choices, despite a number of studies on the impact of individual-level and institutional factors. The article addresses this gap by examining how family life stages are related to particular aspects of job quality among employed women in 27 European countries. The central argument of the analysis is that high-quality jobs are conducive to both transitions to motherhood and employment after childbirth as women select into these roles. Accordingly, mothers of young children, if employed, are expected to have relatively better quality jobs. Four dimensions of job quality are considered: job security, career progression, working time and intrinsic job quality. The results indicate that mothers with young children are more likely to hold high-quality jobs than women at other life stages with respect to working time quality and job security, but with some variation across countries for job security. The findings highlight the importance of high-quality jobs for women’s fertility decisions and labour market attachment after childbirth, with implications for European employment policy.     

Religion and fertility in the United States: The importance of marriage patterns and hispanic origin

The marital fertility of white Catholic wives in the United States was higher than that of non-Catholic wives in 1977–1981, but when Hispanics were excluded, the differential disappeared; therefore, the Catholic-non-Catholic differential in recent years was due entirely to the higher fertility of Hispanic Catholics. The Total Fertility Rates (TFR) of Catholics were slightly lower in 1977–1981 than those for white Protestants, primarily because Catholic women tend to marry later than Protestant women. This finding was confirmed by multivariate analysis of data on children ever born. We examine some additional data and various theories to speculate on whether these patterns will last.     

Intergenerational patterns of teenage fertility

One of the frequently cited consequences of teen childbearing is the repetition of early births across generations, which thereby perpetuates a cycle of poverty and disadvantage. We use data from the 1988 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), Cycle IV, to examine trends and determinants of the intergenerational teen fertility link for women who reached adolescence between the 1950s and the 1980s. We find that daughters of both white and black teen mothers face significantly higher risks of teen childbearing than daughters of older mothers. We also find, more generally, that patterns of teenage family formation (i.e., both marriage and childbearing behaviors) tend to be repeated intergenerationally. The results suggest that the intrafamily propensity for early childbearing is not inherited biologically, at least not through factors related to the timing of puberty. Rather, the intergenerational patterns appear to operate at least in part through the socioeconomic and family context in which children grow up.     

Birth spacing and fertility limitation: a behavioral analysis of a nineteenth century frontier population

Our analysis of changing birth interval distributions over the course of a fertility transition from natural to controlled fertility has examined three closely related propositions. First, within both natural fertility populations (identified at the aggregate level) and cohorts following the onset of fertility limitation, we hypothesized that substantial groups of women with long birth intervals across the individually specified childbearing careers could be identified. That is, even during periods when fertility behavior at the aggregate level is consistent with a natural fertility regime, birth intervals at all parities are inversely related to completed family size. Our tabular analysis enables us to conclude that birth spacing patterns are parity dependent; there is stability in CEB-parity specific mean and birth interval variance over the entire transition. Our evidence does not suggest that the early group of women limiting and spacing births was marked by infecundity. Secondly, the transition appears to be associated with an increasingly larger proportion of women shifting to the same spacing schedules associated with smaller families in earlier cohorts. Thirdly, variations in birth spacing by age of marriage indicate that changes in birth intervals over time are at least indirectly associated with age of marriage, indicating an additional compositional effect. The evidence we have presented on spacing behavior does not negate the argument that parity-dependent stopping behavior was a powerful factor in the fertility transition. Our data also provide evidence of attempts to truncate childbearing. Specifically, the smaller the completed family size, the longer the ultimate birth interval; and ultimate birth intervals increase across cohorts controlling CEB and parity. But spacing appears to represent an additional strategy of fertility limitation. Thus, it may be necessary to distinguish spacing and stopping behavior if one wishes to clarify behavioral patterns within a population (Edlefsen, 1981; Friedlander et al., 1980; Rodriguez and Hobcraft, 1980). Because fertility transition theories imply increased attempts to limit family sizes, it is important to examine differential behavior within subgroups achieving different family sizes. It is this level of analysis which we have attempted to achieve in utilizing parity-specific birth intervals controlled by children ever born.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Kenya's record population growth: a dilemma of development

The causes and implications of Kenya's 4% rate of natural increase and fertility rate of 8.1 births per woman were examined. Attention was directed to the following: pronatalist pressures; inadvertent pronatalist impact of development; women's education and employment and fertility; population growth and pressures; mortality decline and population growth; fertility levels and differentials; fertility desires; the family planning program; and family planning knowledge, attitudes, and practice. Kenya's development success has worked to push up the population growth rate. Improved health care and nutrition halved infant mortality from 160 to 87 deaths/1000 live births between 1958 and 1977 and a marked increase in primary school enrollment may be factors in the birthrate increase to 53/1000 population. At this time fertility is highest among women with 1-4 years of education. The 1977-1978 Kenya Fertility Survey showed that only 5.8% of married women were using modern contraception, indicating that the national family planning program, established in 1967, has made little progress. Program difficulties have included shortages of staff, supplies and easily accessible clinic as well as an almost universal desire on the part of Kenyans for families of at least 7 children. Children are viewed as essential to survival and status to the rural population.     

Puzzles and further explorations in the interrelationships of successive births with husband’s income,spouses’ education and race

When fertility is examined in the detail of individual parity progressions and birth-order transitions, important interactions between the effects of income and education are seen. Among the findings are: the negative effect of education on fertility is stronger at all parities for less educated compared to more highly educated women. Additional income has a more positive effect for more highly educated than for less educated women. For women with 0-8 years of education the effect of more income is positive when the family has no children but negative thereafter, but for college-educated women the effect of more income is positive. And additional income has a less positive (more negative) effect on fertility among nonwhites than among whites.     

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.     

Family composition and the labor force activity of American wives

This is a study of the employment patterns of American wives in relation to the composition of their families. The data are taken from the 1960 United States Census, both from published tabulations and the 1/1000 sample. The population studied is non-Negro, non-farm, married, husband present women who are under the age of sixty. The methods of analysis used include the comparison of employment rates among subpopulations and a dummy variable regression technique. Aspects of family composition studied include age of the youngest child (in single years in order to determine whether there are discontinuities in the rates of employment when youngest children enter school, etc.), number of children in the family, and the presence of other relatives in the family. The paper concludes with a discussion of the meaning of family status differentials in employment including differential preferences for employment, differential fertility experience, and differential demands on the mother’s time. Some discussion of the use of cross section data of this sort to infer life cycle patterns of employment is included.     

The influence of human fertility on the economic conditions of the rural population in poland

Summary In 1970, Polish women in agricultural households reported larger numbers of children born alive than women in other occupations. When controlling for the influence of age at marriage and duration of marriage, the average number of children born per women among the farming population increased directly with the amount of privately owned agricultural land. Consistently, women whose principal source of livelihood was derived from non-agricultural sources even though they resided in villages, showed lower fertility than those in the agricultural sector, but significantly higher fertility than city women. This study is based on the five per cent sample of ever-married women between 15 and 70 years of age interviewed about their past reproductive histories in Poland during the 1970 Census of Population.The conclusions identify the high level of human fertility in rural populations as the main determinant of economic status among Polish peasants whose sources of support derive primarily from farming. Additional evidence supporting the hypothesis of dependence of the agricultural economy on the force of human reproduction is based on data for Slovakia and the Czech regions.