Conference Agenda

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.