Personality plays an essential role with respect to important life outcomes such as education or career success. Although these outcomes are linked with family formation processes, the association between personality and family formation (dissolution) has been underexplored in demographic research. My study contributes to existing research by examining the prospective association between two personality facets (social maturity (SM), and emotional stability (ES)) and family formation and dissolution processes, i.e. 1) marital status, 2) fertility, and 3) partnership dissolution as both a) divorce and b) cohabitation dissolution, based on large Swedish register data. Poisson regression, Linear Probability, and Cox proportional hazard models were applied for different outcomes. My findings suggest that males with high scores on SM and ES measured at age of assignment to military service (17-20 years) are more likely to get married by age 39 and higher. Regarding fertility, SM and ES reveal positive associations with offspring counts and negative associations with the probability of remaining childless by age 39 and higher. Relationship dissolution is negatively linked with SM and ES, in particular among the lowest personality scores. Further analyses using sibling comparisons support these findings.

Recent work has demonstrated the impact of first union dynamics, both formations and dissolutions, on population composition in low fertility contexts. In light of the potential importance of first union dynamics in contexts where it is becoming more urgent to understand the underlying drivers of population change, we examine the nexus between union dynamics and immigration in Finland, a country with a relatively new immigration regime and low cohort fertility projected to continue declining.

Using a survival analysis framework and complete Finnish register data on all women aged 18-65 registered as residents in the country spanning 1987-2020, we compare the heterosexual union dynamic patterns among immigrants and their descendants, by identifying which characteristics, such as education and region of origin, moderate first union (cohabitations and marriages) formations and dissolutions. We distinguish between 1st generation immigrants, 2nd generation immigrants (those with two 1st generation parents), and the 2.5 generation (those with one Finnish and one 1st generation parent).

Preliminary work suggests that women in the 2nd and 2.5 generation were overall less likely to enter a first union compared to native Finnish women, and that among the available couple immigrant pairing typologies, couples made of two 1st generation immigrants show the lowest rate of first union dissolution at 44.76%, while couples made up of two 2nd generation immigrants show the highest rate of first union dissolution at 71.40%. Studying these union dynamic patterns offers insights into how subsequent generations in Finland will form, continue in, and dissolve unions.

This study examines the dynamic interplay of parental partnership transitions and mental health outcomes among mothers and fathers, utilizing Finnish register data. Following both parents within a family over their firstborn child’s childhood, we employ random effects linear probability models to analyze various transition scenarios following parental separation.

The analysis spans from one year before to four years after each transition, offering a detailed exploration of maternal and paternal mental health trajectories. Moving beyond individual outcomes, we investigate the interconnected nature of family dynamics, specifically examining how parental partnership transitions influence the mental health outcomes of both mothers and fathers. Exploring whether transitions, such as mothers or fathers repartnering, affect the mental health of the other parent, even when their own partnership status remains unchanged, contributes to a deeper understanding of reciprocal effects within parent dyads.

Preliminary results indicate that overall, mothers experience poorer mental health compared to fathers. Repartnering immediately after separation or following a period of singlehood leads to short-term improvements in mental health, but levels eventually adjust to previous states for both mothers and fathers. Notably, repartnering of both mothers and fathers positively influences the mental health of the other separated parent, even when their partnership status remains unchanged. Moreover, parental reconciliation improves the mental health of both mothers and fathers.

These findings suggest that after a separation, parents remain closely connected, and partnership transitions of the ex-partner influence their own mental health. One explanation for this could be that, in the sense of the linked lives concept, separated parents remain highly dependent on each other, possibly through shared parenting responsibilities or the child’s well-being. Furthermore, the preliminary findings not only advance the understanding of reciprocal effects within parent dyads but also the general understanding of the association of parental separation, repartnering, and reconciliation with mental health.

Individuals who experience divorce in childhood are more likely to divorce themselves as adults. Notably, the magnitude of the intergenerational divorce transmission is stronger for groups among whom divorce is rare. This transmission may reflect differences in family behaviours passed on from parent to child, or stem from differences in social norms between sub-groups. Sociologists and demographers have struggled to disentangle socioeconomic factors and norms, because groups that are less wealthy tend to have higher divorce rates. Here we use data from Finland, where two native ethnolinguistic groups with comparable socioeconomic characteristics – but different divorce risks – live side by side; Swedish speakers and Finnish speakers (5% and 90% of the population, respectively). Using register data on the entire population from 1987 onwards, we examine separation risk as a function of parental divorce (couples n= 554,337, separations n= 309,676, total years at risk 4,890,095). Cox regressions demonstrate that risk of separation is higher for couples where both sets of parents had divorce than if only one set of parents had divorced, adjusted for a range of demographic and socioeconomic covariates. Moreover, the intergenerational transmission is greater among Swedish speakers, who have an overall lower separation rate. These group differences in separation risk persist even after controlling for socioeconomic factors and each partner’s experience of parental divorce. Notably, Finnish-speaking couples who reside in Swedish-dominated areas have both somewhat lower separation risk, and higher intergenerational transmission than their peers in Finnish-dominated areas. These results point to a social transmission of separation, over and above socioeconomic causes. The role of geographic (im)mobility of the Swedish-speaking minority, social cohesion and partner markets are discussed.

This article examines the fertility patterns of a growing group of parents – female same-sex couples (FSSC) with children – and through comparisons with mothers in different-sex couples (DSC) simultaneously examines mechanisms behind the earnings impact of motherhood. Using Norwegian population wide administrative records from 2002, when same-sex parenthood was legally recognized, until 2017, we find that FSSC's propensity to have children is heavily skewed toward the end of the period, that they more seldom have a second child, and that those who do switch birth parent for the second child in about 50% of cases. These patterns may partially be explained by barriers for FSSC to have (multiple) children, such as access to reproductive technologies being expensive, legally restricted, and geographically far in-between. Comparing the earnings losses of partners in FSSC where both partners gave birth, or where only one partner carried children, we conclude that the choice of birth mother of the first and second child have short term, but no long term, impacts on mothers’ earnings. Likewise, comparing non-birth mothers whose partner carried one versus two children, shows that an additional child to care for in the family did not affect earnings of the non-birth parent. However, when comparing mothers in FSSC to mothers in DSC that gave birth the same number of times, with the same number of children in the family, we find that having a male rather than a female partner is the mechanism that can explain most of women’s earnings losses after parenthood. Thus, our results indicate that gender norms of mothers as caregivers and fathers as breadwinners, indicated by the presence of a male partner, has a greater influence on long-term earnings losses compared to number of pregnancies and number of children, respectively.

Our study examines the prevalence of gender transitions in Sweden over time and documents the sociodemographic characteristics of people transitioning in different periods. We use national administrative data covering the transgender population from 1973 to 2020 and analyze two common events in a gender transition: the earliest diagnosis of gender incongruence and the change of legal gender. We have three main findings. First, the measured prevalence of both types of events is relatively low in all periods, although it has increased substantially since the early 2010s. Second, the recent increase in transition prevalence is most pronounced among people in early adulthood; in particular, young transgender men drive an increase in overall transition rates through 2018, followed by moderate declines in 2019 and 2020. Third, transgender men and women have substantially lower socioeconomic outcomes than cisgender men and women, regardless of the age at which they transition or the historical period.

Despite considerable convergence, gender gaps in the labour market remain substantial across countries and can largely be attributed to the differential impact of parenthood on men and women. While family policies, such as childcare provision, have proven effective in enhancing maternal labour market outcomes in the short term, their impact on fathers' involvement in child-rearing remains less explored. Fathers' engagement is crucial for challenging traditional gender norms and narrowing long-term gender gaps. This study investigates how the availability of universal childcare affects fathers' early involvement in raising children and a more equal division of childcare responsibilities throughout early childhood. In particular, we are interested in the effect on fathers' parental leave-taking after birth and their subsequent involvement in parental childcare. For our analyses, we use data from the DJI Childcare Study (KiBS), providing annual individual-level information on childcare needs and arrangements throughout childhood, along with fathers' parental leave-taking and childcare rates from administrative data at the county level from the Federal Statistical Office of Germany.

The introduction of a legal claim in Germany in 2013 for publicly funded childcare for children below the age of three years created a quasi-experimental variation in the regional availability of childcare, as the speed of childcare expansion varied substantially across municipalities. Using this exogenous variation in childcare availability, we estimate a two-way fixed effects specification. Preliminary results indicate that a higher childcare rate in the year preceding birth leads to earlier childcare entry (below 18 months). Additionally, a higher pre-birth childcare rate significantly increases fathers' uptake of parental leave. However, this increase in paternal leave-taking does not translate into higher involvement of fathers in parental childcare in the short term. Our analyses shed light on the interplay between various family policies and consider paternal behaviour within family dynamics.

Despite improvements, European LGBQ populations (sexual minorities) continue to face structural obstacles, interpersonal discrimination, and social norms opposing family formation. During the more than 25 years that same-sex partnerships have been legal in Sweden, policy protections for parenting in same-sex couples have slowly strengthened. For example, adoption protections have been strengthened for nonbiological same-sex parents, and female same-sex couples have gained access to in vitro fertilization. How has the sociodemographic composition of people in parenting same-sex couples changed during this time? We use administrative data from Swedish population registers covering the period 1996-2021. Analyses document historical changes in the sociodemographic characteristics of Swedes aged 20-60 who are in same-sex unions and living with at least one child, compared to those in childless same-sex unions and to those in different-sex unions who are and are not parenting. Our preliminary analyses have found that gender differences in parenthood within same-sex couples are increasingly stratifying same-sex marriage by gender, parental status, and socioeconomic status. As of 2021 a majority of female same-sex unions now involve parenting at least one child, in stark contrast to male same-sex couples. In recent years, people in parenting same-sex couples no longer tend to have had a previous marriage. For both women and men and increasingly over time, those in same-sex unions who are parenting have higher socioeconomic status than those in childless same-sex unions. Emerging trends over time, in tandem with substantial policy changes for same-sex families, point to new patterns in childbearing and parenting among female and male same-sex couples in Sweden.

Fertility rates have been below the sustainability level of 2.1 children per woman in most high-income countries for decades. Meanwhile, the use of artificial reproductive techniques (ART) has increased for conceiving a child. In this study, we combine nationwide information on abortions, ART and immigration to illustrate the difference in pregnancy rates and fertility rates.

We used Danish registry data on ART treatments, induced abortions and country of origin to estimate pregnancy rates and compare them to fertility rates. To include birth cohorts with not completed fertility, ART and abortion rates, these were forecasted.

Our results clearly show that pregnancy rates have declined more rapidly than fertility rates and that immigration has significantly contributed to the fertility rates seen in Denmark. The forecasted fertility and pregnancy rates suggest this pattern will continue.

We infer from our results that pregnancy rates may be more informative in understanding the fertility crisis on Earth and that biological factors could significantly contribute to the findings.

Fertility trends underwent strong fluctuations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Upward and downward fertility shifts, although of varying size, occurred quite synchronously in many higher-income countries. This study focuses on the sharp downturn in monthly birth rates at the turn of the years 2021-2022, which has been rather puzzling given the relatively stable and positive fertility dynamics seen during most of 2021 in many countries. This decline in births is linked with conceptions in spring-summer 2021, when the COVID-19 vaccination effort was gathering momentum. The central aim of this study is to explore whether the rollout of COVID-19 vaccination and the fall in monthly fertility are associated. Using an interrupted time series design, the impact of two interventions – the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and the start of COVID-19 vaccination– on the trends in seasonally- and calendar-adjusted monthly TFRs has been evaluated. The findings suggest that at least in some countries, the COVID-19 vaccination seemingly influenced childbearing behaviour and thus contributed to the decline in birth rates observed about nine months following the start of the effort. More in-depth and context-sensitive research is needed to further explore causal mechanisms underlying changes in childbearing decisions in response to the COVID-19 vaccination.

This study investigates the differential impact of men's or women’s job loss on fertility across different couple types: income-egalitarian vs. male-breadwinner vs. female-breadwinner and high-income vs. medium-income vs. low-income couples. We applied event history analysis with linear probability models to the Norwegian population and employment Registers for the period 2005-2017. Prior studies on the unemployment-fertility relationship did not use exogenous employment shocks and partner characteristics. We used the exogenous shock for job loss, i.e. plant (workplace) closures, to infer a causal effect of men's or women’s job loss on fertility within couples. Our results show that plant closure slightly negatively affects the probability of first birth within three years of plant closure for both males and females. However, we do not observe any significant gender differences in the probability of first birth. We also do not observe variations in the effects of plant closure across different couple types, including income-egalitarian, male-breadwinner, and female-breadwinner couples, as well as high-, medium-, and low-income couples. These results differ from studies in the UK and Germany conducted by Di Nallo & Lipps, 2023. We argue that the Nordic countries' favourable employment conditions, gender-egalitarian attitudes, and robust welfare state provisions may explain the absence of fertility response and gender differences in fertility response to plant closures. In general, experiencing plant closure does not decrease the probability of first birth in any subgroup of couples. However, a couple is less likely to have first birth if they are not a high-income or income-egalitarian couple.

This study compares the effect of civil service and private sector employment on the transition rate to the first child, considering possible effect heterogeneity of sex, contract status, partner's working status, and residence in West or East Germany.

The civil service is often associated with a family friendly work environment offering the possibility to reverse the problem of low birth rate. An influence has been demonstrated in other European countries, but Germany lacks an individual-level analysis that takes into account possible heterogeneities.

Using data from the German Family Panel (Pairfam) of 5985 employees who experienced 677 first birth events, we run discrete event history models in a piecewise-constant specification to calculate the transition to first child conditional on civil service or private sector employment.

We do not find a substantial and significant effect on fertility behaviour for either women or men. Moreover, there is no evidence of effect heterogeneity by contract status, partner’s employment, or region.

The findings indicate that the current civil service does not have the assumed potential to positively influence family formation and address the problem of low fertility in the German welfare state.

Fertility dynamics and especially failure to reproduce are key drivers of demographic change, yet we lack studies of how fertility resilience, how fertility of populations can resist and recover from changes and disturbances differs in different subgroups in a population. Fertility resilience is likely to vary by socioeconomic class, but it has been little investigated over longer time spans. Using a unique dataset of Finnish family lineages over 150 years, we explored male and female childlessness by socioeconomic status during the first stages of the demographic transition and in relation to recurring large-scale societal and economical disturbances. We defined lifetime childlessness as having survived to age 45 without any children. Lifetime childlessness fluctuated in response to crises, doubling during the study period from around 10% in the first birth cohort of 1800 to 20% in the last birth cohort born 1945-49. Importantly, we found that higher socioeconomic status indicated a higher lifetime likelihood to reproduce, while the effects of societal crises were mostly confined to lower socioeconomic groups. Based on these results, we suggest that fertility resilience was high among landowners and those with socially highly ranked professions, but low among the poorest socioeconomic group. Temporal patterns in marriage and family size were indicated to underlie patterns in childlessness. In sum, our findings suggest that the family formation of lower socioeconomic groups suffer by far the most during crises and do not necessarily recuperate over time. Considering fertility resilience, and the differential vulnerability among socioeconomic groups, is also relevant for the future of human reproduction in the contemporary era of escalating crises.

Much existing research in the demography of kinship focuses on the structural availability of kin (i.e., number and kind alive). Importantly, family structures vary across individual life courses and between individuals, resulting in a different availability of kin depending on the life stage and for specific subgroups of the population. Yet, we know less about such life-course family structures. ‘Generational placement trajectories’ depict a person’s relative position within their intergenerational family and describe if, when, and for how long they are a child, parent, or grandparent. At the same time, they also define life-course intergenerational family structures because they highlight which family members are alive at a given time. In the current analysis, we combine empirical and synthetic micro-level data to project generational placement trajectories in Norway for the 1953 birth cohort. We use register data to characterize trajectories for the years in which it is available (1953-2019). For ‘future’ periods (2020-2051), we use demographic kinship microsimulation to cover the entire 0-100 age range. Preliminary results show that generational placement trajectories are an efficient tool for showing heterogeneity in intergenerational kin availability. Moreover, our use of microsimulation lets us overcome data limitations for their analysis (e.g., reporting bias or selective participation for survey-based analyses or lack of register data for many countries and periods, as well as right-censoring for both data sources), so that we can extend the characterization of life-course family structures to contexts, periods, and age ranges for which high-quality micro-level data is not available. Through this, we pave the path towards obtaining results on a global level and from projections into the future.

Although increased parental investments are likely to shift childbearing perspectives, how this shift in parenthood norms relates to childbearing plans is poorly understood. We investigate how subscribing to intensive parenting norms relates to childbearing plans in Sweden and how this relationship varies by gender, current social class and parents’ social class. We use the second wave of the Swedish Generations and Gender Survey (SGGS), completed in 2021, which included a novel module to assess three dimensions of intensive parenting. This study is based on 3,733 women and men with and without children. Our analytical approach is multivariate ordinary least squares regression, stratified by gender and parity. Findings varied by the dimension and measure of intensive parenting being analyzed. Results reveal either a positive (intending to have a child in the next three years) or null relationship between individual measures of intensive parenting and men’s fertility intentions. A more complex picture emerges for women, whereby fertility intentions were positively linked to norms related to educational opportunities for children and the child-centeredness dimension, but fertility intentions were negatively linked to agreement with parenting being very demanding and children’s involvement in activities being important. Although a relatively straightforward positive relationship appears for men, how parenting attitudes are linked to women’s fertility plans depends on the dimension of intensive parenting under consideration.

Evidence from several nations has demonstrated that children and adolescents with divorced or separated parents do on average less well in school compared to those who grow up with nondivorced parents. For children living in single-parent families, research has shown that only those children whose parents separated shortly before they received their grades were disadvantaged. This might indicate that children learn how to cope with the new family situation and that after a phase of adaptation, the negative consequences of parents’ separation on school outcomes diminish. However, we know little about children’s adaptation to other family forms, such as stepfamilies. Given that the number of children in stepfamilies increased over the last years, it is important to identify potential pattern of educational disadvantages in this group. Family roles and daily routines must be re-established when starting a stepfamily, and ambiguity might be induced by the stepparent as a new authority figure. Therefore, we argue that children adapt to their new family situation and that negative effects are strongest in the years shortly after a family transition. In our study, we make use of large register data and linked datasets from Norway (n=1,368,808). The data contain information about school performance in 10th grade, when children are normally 16 years old, and various demographic variables. School performance is measured in the Grade Point Average (GPA). We analyze differences in GPA between children who have experienced separation or stepfamily formation at different ages. Applying Entropy Balancing as a weighting approach, our preliminary results indicate that, contrary to our adaptation hypothesis, the difference between children living in different family structures is stable and appears to be independent of children’s age at the family transition. An analysis of the heterogeneous effects based on children’s gender and socio-economic background is pending.