Abstract
This study aimed to explore the relationship between Chinese women’s childhood family background and their fertility intentions, including their fertility intentions for a second child under the universal two-child policy, and the ideal fertility intentions under no birth restrictions. Data of participants extracted from the 2016 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey was adopted for analysis. Zero-inflated Poisson regression and multinomial logistic regression models were used to determine the predictors of women’s intended number of children under different policy conditions. The number of siblings and parents’ education prove to be significant predictors of female fertility intentions, even controlling for several characteristic variables. The instability of parental marriage shaped female fertility intentions remarkably and made them highly polarized under no conditional or institutional constrains. A cohort effect on female fertility intentions was also identified. Women with better socioeconomic status (SES) and born in families with better economic conditions showed relatively strong childbearing desires.
Highlights
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The number of siblings of Chinese women was positively and significantly associated with their intended number of children.
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Parents’ education was negatively correlated to daughters’ fertility intentions for a second child or more children.
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The instability of parental marriage shaped daughters’ fertility intentions remarkably and made them highly polarized under no conditional or institutional constrains.
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The universal two-child policy is unlikely to pull China out of its low-fertility situation.
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Data availability
The data used in this study is from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS) by the Center for Social Science Survey at Sun Yat-sen University (http://css.sysu.edu.cn) in Guangzhou, China. The author has reservations.
Notes
Zhai is the president of China Population Association, and a member of the Expert Committee of National Health and Family Planning Commission of PRC. His prediction had caused lots of controversies and worries.
“First married” refers to first marriage and does not include any forms of cohabitation in the Chinese social context, and here means parents were still on their first marriage when participants were 14.
Daughters here refer to the women participants themselves. Hereafter, I use the term “daughters” and “women” interchangeably.
Actually, the child mortality rate in rural areas was almost 3 times higher than that in urban areas, and the most important reason was malnutrition caused by relatively low income, partly due to the separation of some welfare benefits from hukou status (Liu et al., 2015; China Health and Family Planning Commission, 2013).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sun Yat-sen University for data collection, as well as Dr. Lianxiong Huang, Mr. Jian Song, Dr. Xiqin Liu, Dr. Haibin Li, Ms. Audrey Holmes, the anonymous referees and the editors for their constructive comments on earlier drafts.
Funding
This work was supported by National Social Science Fund of China (Project No. 17BRK028).
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Preparation of this manuscript was performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments. The CLDS investigators obtained informed consent from participants during sampling.
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Lan, M. Relationship between Chinese Women’s Childhood Family Background and their Fertility Intentions under Different Policy Conditions. J Child Fam Stud 30, 3016–3028 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-021-02095-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-021-02095-y