Abstract
In this paper we address the question why childless women and men aged 35 years and older, who originally were considering having children, voluntarily gave up on having children. We hypothesise that this adjustment could be attributed to five mechanisms: adaptation to a lifestyle without children; resignation because of severe hindrances to having children; approaching the end of the fecund period; perceiving a low degree of social influence from significant others to have children; and a low degree of personal persistence in pursuing life goals. We analyse data from the first six waves of the German Family Panel (Pairfam) and employ multinomial logistic regression models. As the dependent variable we distinguished four types of sequences over the observation period: “permanently considering having children”, “given up on having children”, “switching”, and “permanently not considering having children”. Being female, being not employed, and having low scores on the emotional autonomy scale increased the likelihood of giving up on having children, while anticipating positive consequences of parenthood and perceiving influence from parents to have a child decreased it. The results show that all mechanisms addressed by the hypotheses were at work to a certain extent. In particular, the integration of personality factors and the importance of other life goals beyond parenthood provided valuable insights into the reasons for giving up on having children. Future research in this field should focus more than was possible in our study on societal age norms and the role of partners in giving up on having children.
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Notes
The German Family Panel is coordinated by Josef Brüderl, Karsten Hank, Johannes Huinink, Bernhard Nauck, Franz Neyer, and Sabine Walper (Brüderl et al. 2015). It is funded as a long-term project by the German Research Foundation (DFG). A detailed description of the study can be found in Huinink et al. (2011). For further information about the sampling procedure, the response rates, and the instruments see the pairfam website (www.pairfam.de).
The exact definitions of the types are shown in Table A1 in the Online Appendix. A similar approach was chosen by Heaton et al. (1999) based on two waves (1988 and 1994) from the National Survey of Families and Households in the USA.
The item is intended to measure the abstract importance of a partnership for persons with and without a current partner. However, we cannot exclude that respondents with a partner evaluated the importance of their own present partnerships.
The three other life goals were “pursuing my education or career interests”, “keeping in touch with friends”, and “having a (another) child”.
The results of the sub-models including control variables are displayed in Table A2 in the Online Appendix.
In the statistical community there is controversy and no clear recommendation whether and how to use weights in multivariate regression models (see, e.g. Winship and Radbill 1994; Gelman 2007). We decided to present the unweighted estimates, which can be justified by the fact that important variables accounting for selective non-response (especially gender, education, employment status, and region) are included in the model. The relative risk ratios of the model with weighted data are similar. The standard errors, however, are higher.
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Acknowledgements
This study uses data from the German Family Panel pairfam, coordinated by Josef Brüderl, Karsten Hank, Johannes Huinink, Bernhard Nauck, Franz Neyer, and Sabine Walper. The pairfam study is funded as long-term project by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive feedbacks.
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Buhr, P., Huinink, J. Why Childless Men and Women Give Up on Having Children. Eur J Population 33, 585–606 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-017-9429-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-017-9429-1