Fertility postponement, economic uncertainty, and the increasing income prerequisites of parenthood

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

March 13, 2024

Summary:

Rich societies have witnessed a postponement of parenthood over the past two decades, and young adults’ economic conditions are often invoked to explain this trend. However, macro-level trends in both “subjective” perceptions of economic uncertainty and “objective” measures of actual income provide no satisfactory explanation for the postponement of parenthood. We propose a potential solution to this puzzle by hypothesizing that the economic prerequisites of parenthood have increased over the past two decades. We expect that this has raised the degree of perceived economic certainty and the level of income that people wish to achieve before having a first child. To test this hypothesis, we draw on individual-level longitudinal data from seven countries from the Comparative Panel File. Our findings show that young adults’ perceived economic uncertainty is not consistently associated with the transition to parenthood. Moreover, the effects of perceived economic uncertainty did not change over time. In contrast, we find consistent evidence that the link between income and first birth has become more strongly positive over the past two decades. This is true mainly for women but also for men, and suggests that increasing income prerequisites are a key mechanism behind the postponement of parenthood.

Published in

Population and Development Review

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.12624

ISSN

987921

Subjects

Notes

Online Early

Open Access

© 2024 The Authors. Population and Development Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Population Council.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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