Recent Trends in U.S. Childbearing Intentions
- PDF / 474,024 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 73 Downloads / 208 Views
Recent Trends in U.S. Childbearing Intentions Caroline Sten Hartnett 1 & Alison Gemmill 2 # Population Association of America 2020
Abstract The U.S. period total fertility rate has declined steadily since the Great Recession, reaching 1.73 children in 2018, the lowest level since the 1970s. This pattern could mean that current childbearing cohorts will end up with fewer children than previous cohorts, or this same pattern could be an artifact of a tempo distortion if individuals are simply postponing births they plan to eventually have. In this research note, we use data on current parity and future intended births from the 2006–2017 National Survey of Family Growth to shed light on this issue. We find that total intended parity declined (from 2.26 in 2006–2010 to 2.16 children in 2013–2017), and the proportion intending to remain childless increased slightly. Decomposition indicates that the decline was not due to changes in population composition but rather changes in the subgroups’ rates themselves. The decline in intended parity is particularly notable at young ages and among those who are Hispanic. These results indicate that although tempo distortion is likely an important contributor to the decline in TFR, it is not the sole explanation: U.S. individuals are intending to have fewer children than their immediate predecessors, which may translate into a decline in cohort completed parity. However, the change in intended parity is modest, and average intended parity remains above two children. Keywords Fertility . Childbearing . Fertility intentions . Intended parity
Introduction The U.S. total fertility rate (TFR) has declined steadily since the Great Recession, from a level of 2.12 in 2007 to 1.73 in 2018 (Hamilton et al. 2019; Human Fertility Database 2019). It is unclear how much of the recent decline in fertility is an artifact of a tempo Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-02000929-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* Caroline Sten Hartnett [email protected]
1
University of South Carolina, Sloan College #321, Columbia, SC 29208, USA
2
Johns Hopkins University, 615 N. Wolfe Street, Room E4148, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA
C.S. Hartnett, A. Gemmill
distortion (i.e., women are simply postponing births they will eventually have) or instead the drop in period fertility signals a shift toward smaller families. To help shed light on this question, demographers often rely on statements of expected or intended lifetime fertility as an early indicator of potential shifts in cohort completed fertility, independent of postponement effects (Morgan 2001). Fertility preferences, although imperfect, have proved useful for recent U.S. cohorts. Research has shown that average completed fertility falls somewhat short of average intended fertility, with gaps ranging from about 0.15 to 0.25 births (Beaujouan and Berghammer 2019; Hagewen and Morgan 2005; Morgan and Rackin 2010). In this research note, we answer
Data Loading...
