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Do Individuals with Higher Education Prefer Smaller Families? Education, Fertility Preference and the Value of Children in Greater Jakarta

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Abstract

An emerging scholarship indicates that the negative educational gradient in fertility preference has reversed in some low-fertility societies in the West. This paper explores the association between education and fertility preference in Greater Jakarta. We use longitudinal data from 962 young adults surveyed in 2010 and 2014. We look at two complementary measures of fertility preference: desired number of children, and a series of attitudinal questions around the value of children, supplemented by insights from in-depth interviews. We find a slight negative educational gradient in the desired number of children, but the means are not significantly different across education categories (average of 2.43). While desired family size may not vary much by educational groupings, education continues to shape other underlying facets of fertility motivations and regulation. Multivariate analysis suggests a positive and significant association between education and the likelihood of wanting more than two children in 2010.Tertiary-educated young adults, however, have the lowest likelihood of having achieved their desired family size by 2014. Tertiary-educated respondents demonstrate higher levels of agency in governing their fertility choices. Qualitative insights suggest little socio-economic difference in how young adults articulate the psychological benefits associated with children, but less well-off respondents express higher anxiety about the costs of raising children. As the first birth occurs at a relatively early stage in their childbearing years for most women, especially those with a lower education level, there is considerable scope for lived experience to influence values, preferences and outcomes.

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Notes

  1. Authors’ own calculation from Intercensal Population Census dataset-weighted frequency.

  2. In interpreting these figures from IDHS, it should be noted that the crude analysis here does not control for age. Women with low education will be older than those with high education in any one survey. So, the observed trend could be due to age rather than to education. Comparison of a cross-sectional TFR with a cohort measure (ideal family size) is also doubtful. There is a problem of age weighting—for the ideal number of children, the response of an older woman counts the same as the response of the younger woman but, current fertility (TFR) is largely the outcome of the behavior of younger women.

  3. The nine broad categories on the advantages of children proposed by Hoffman and Hoffman were: “adult status and social identity; expansion of the self, ties to a larger entity, immortality; morality: religion, altruism, good of the group, norms regarding sexuality, action on impulse, virtue; primary group ties, affection; stimulation, novelty, fun; achievement competence, creativity; power, influence, effectiveness; social comparison, competition; economic utility” (Trommsdorff and Nauck 2005, pp. 9–10).

  4. Data from the Intercensal Population Census 2015 suggests that among adults aged 25 and over residing I within the core provincial boundary of DKI Jakarta, 21% had primary school qualification or less, 17% had completed junior high school, 42% had completed senior secondary schooling, and only about 19% had completed tertiary education. This is significantly different than the national distribution cited earlier in the Background section of this paper, whereby the share of tertiary educated adults in Jakarta is almost twice as large as the national share.

  5. Here, it is not so much the absolute opportunity cost that is the issue—opportunity costs will be lower for those with a low earning capacity than for those with a high earning capacity. The issue is the need for money to sustain a reasonable standard of living. This might be considered to be relative opportunity cost—the proportional impact of loss of the wife’s earnings on high-income and low-income couples.

  6. The relevant question in the questionnaire was worded as follows: Including any living children you may have at the moment, how many children would you like to have in total? (Ind: Termasuk anak hidup yang sudah anda miliki sekarang, berapa jumlah anak yang anda inginkan?). There was no question on “ideal number of children” in the questionnaire.

  7. At the outset, these five questions are not likely to be unidimensional. Together, they have low internal consistency (Cronbach Alpha = 0.1961).

  8. Our decision to model fertility preferences as a binary outcome is not without reason. In our dataset, about 58% of our respondents reported 2 as their desired number of children in 2010 (1.6% reported 0, and 3.5% reported 1 as their desired number of children). In the literature review, we had extensively outlined how the 2-child family had long been campaigned as the “ideal” family through the national family planning programme. To follow, our analytical interest in this paper is to identify individual correlates of wanting more than what had been institutionally promoted (and subsequently became the popular norm) as the “ideal” number of children.

  9. We address a similar research question on education and realized intentions employing panel data estimation methods in a separate paper, using three waves of data from the Greater Jakarta Transition to Adulthood fielded in 2010, 2014 and 2018.

  10. A further detailed tabulation by education and sex suggests that within each education category, the distribution in the responses to these value of children statements are not statistically different between male and female respondents in most cases. A few exceptions are (1) responses to the statement that “life without children is incomplete,” which show significant differences between tertiary-educated male and female respondents; and (2) responses to the statement “seeing the growth and development of children is a gift of life,” where responses between male and female respondents with senior high school qualifications are significantly different.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geography, The University of Melbourne, Carlton, Victoria, Australia

    Ariane Utomo

  2. Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, Carlton, Victoria, Australia

    Peter McDonald

  3. School of Demography, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Iwu Utomo & Terence Hull

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  1. Ariane Utomo
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  2. Peter McDonald
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  3. Iwu Utomo
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  4. Terence Hull
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Correspondence to Ariane Utomo.

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Utomo, A., McDonald, P., Utomo, I. et al. Do Individuals with Higher Education Prefer Smaller Families? Education, Fertility Preference and the Value of Children in Greater Jakarta. Child Ind Res 14, 139–161 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-020-09752-6

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