Expansion Phase of Two-Child Families: Why Have They Become Prevalent?
The pathway to smaller families in European and English-speaking non-European societies began with the societal and technological changes set in motion by the industrial revolution. Consequently, parents started to invest in their children’s schooling (Axinn, 1993; Axinn & Barber, 2001; Reher, 2011). This entailed a financial cost which led parents to limit their number of offspring, preferring ‘child quality’ over ‘child quantity’ (Caldwell, 1982; Hanushek, 1992). The transition was first observed among the upper social classes, but with time it spread down to the lower social strata.
Family researchers point out to several reasons for which two and not one or three became the preferred and dominant number of children (see Sobotka & Beaujouan, 2014 for a more detailed elaboration). Two is the smallest number of offspring that gives a chance for reaching the universally shared ideal of having a child of each sex, a girl and a boy (Hank, 2007). It can also be seen as an insurance strategy: having two children instead of one increases the chances for meeting parents’ expectations about their offspring. Furthermore, only children are believed to be spoiled, selfish and anti-social (Blake, 1981; Hagewen & Morgan, 2005; Mancillas, 2006). They are also likely to be lonely and so providing companionship for a sibling is often a strong motivation to have a second child (Bulatao, 1981; Jefferies, 2001).
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, i.e. in times when the 1940s birth cohorts were at their peak reproductive ages, the post-war developments that were so favourable to family formation (Van Bavel et al., 2018) still largely prevailed, but first signs of their looming end started appearing. The first post-war economic downturn and rise in unemployment came at a similar time as the rising fear of a ‘population bomb’ (Ehrlich 1968) which in many Western European and the English-speaking non-European countries (the West) triggered socio-political movements like ‘zero population growth’ (ZPG), encouraging (future) parents to have no more than two children (Lück & Bujard, 2018). The public debate explicitly promoted the two-child family model, creating a negative image of larger families and strengthening the dominance of the two-child family model.
In the European state-socialist countries (the East), such debate was largely absent as governments were mostly worried about fertility rates that had been plummeting since the 1950s (Macura, 1974). In many countries, the decline was part of the ongoing fertility transition, intensified by massive industrialisation and urbanisation (Sobotka, 2011). The very high levels of female labour force participation, heavily promoted, if not imposed, by the state-socialist governments, together with a traditional gender division of tasks within the family and cramped living conditions, created further incentives to keep family size small (Brzozowska, 2015). In response to falling fertility rates, the governments adopted pronatalist policies encouraging citizens to start a family earlier rather than later (Sobotka, 2011).
Post-expansion phase of two-child families: Why have alternatives to two grown in importance?
The ideal of two-child family has outlived the baby boom (Sobotka & Beaujouan, 2014) but the rise in the share of two-child families has not (Zeman et al., 2018). The ‘post-expansion’ phase came along with developments—technological, cultural, social and economic—that led to an increasing destandardisation of life trajectories. Below, we briefly describe how the changes in values and partnership trajectories together with the rise in opportunity costs of having children, growing economic inequalities, and labour market instability affected parity-specific fertility in different educational strata.
The intensive cultural changes, or the shift towards post-materialist values (Inglehart, 1977), are closely linked to the spread of the pill. The ability to effectively control the timing and quantum of childbearing was a game-changer in gender and marriage relations (Lesthaeghe, 2010). It made it possible for women to try and satisfy their desire for self-actualisation and independence, including a full-time professional career. Inevitably, this increased the opportunity costs of motherhood (Joshi, 1990, 1998), especially in a context where childcare was considered primarily women’s duty (Goldscheider et al., 2015). The rising importance of self-fulfilment and individualism, both among women and men, often clashed with the constraints and responsibilities of raising children. Consequently, a growing number of women (and also men) decided to either forego or, more often, postpone childbearing. This led to a reduction in the ‘progressing-towards-two’ behaviour. Furthermore, the value shift and the increasing independence of women involved more complex partnership trajectories, marked by an increased number of union dissolutions, including divorces. These developments were first observed in higher social strata in Northern and Western Europe and in English-speaking non-European countries. Later on, however, they spread across social groups and geographic regions, occurring also in Southern Europe and, after the collapse of state socialism, in Central-Eastern Europe (Lesthaeghe, 2010), where they usually unfolded far more quickly (Sobotka, 2008).
For a long time, foregoing childbearing had a strictly positive educational gradient (Beaujouan et al., 2016; Sobotka et al., 2017, 2018; Wood et al., 2014). It is argued that the opportunity costs of motherhood are highest for women with university education as they have more to lose by sacrificing their professional career: a more fulfilling job and a higher income. They have also been more likely to experience problems with finding a partner as the pool of companions suitable for them, i.e. with education and financial resources at a level comparable to or higher than theirs, is smaller than that suitable for women with low or medium education (Grow & Van Bavel, 2015). Consequently, they tend to remain childless more often than other educational groups. However, as a result of the education expansion the group of university graduates has been growing and becoming increasingly more heterogeneous, whereas the selection into the shrinking group of population with low education has been increasing. In today’s Europe, women who face particularly severe obstacles to have (more) children are those with low education. The labour market is becoming increasingly tough for them, they struggle with economic hardship (Beaujouan & Berghammer, 2019; Impicciatore & Zuanna, 2017) and are most likely to remain never-partnered (De Hauw et al., 2017). In many countries, the childlessness rates among them are as high as among the university-educated or higher (Jalovaara et al., 2018; Lazzari et al., 2021; Sobotka et al., 2017, 2018). At the same time, however, low-educated women are nowadays more likely to experience complex family trajectories that often include multiple unions and children within each relationship (Thomson et al., 2014).
The social and economic developments have turned out challenging not only for the low-educated. Since the baby boom generations, the gap between social strata in their lifestyles, family behaviours and income has been widening (Adserà, 2017; Atkinson et al., 2014; McLanahan & Jacobsen, 2015; Perelli-Harris et al., 2010). This trend, strongly linked to the progressing shift towards individualistic values, the shrinking welfare state and an increasingly competitive labour market, has been further strengthened by the spread of intensive parenting style (Hays, 1998; Romagnoli & Wall, 2012). Middle-class parents in particular have been under a growing pressure to extensively invest in their children, both in terms of time and financial resources. In addition, in many countries, there has been a steady increase in the number of jobs in the upper and lower segments of the labour market, while middle-level jobs are disappearing. Consequently, it is increasingly difficult for women (and men) with middle-level qualifications to find ‘good’ jobs (Adserà, 2017). This also makes the ‘progressing-towards-two’ behaviour increasingly more difficult, especially among parents with medium education as they typically have more modest resources than those available to university graduates.
Almost all the developments described above (might) have reduced the transition rates to first and second births. In that case, women who progressed to second birth in the ‘post-expansion’ phase would be more selected and more family-oriented than in the ‘expansion’ phase of two-child families. This might have led to increases in the progression to large families. Notwithstanding the fact that this process was likely to occur in all educational groups, the transition rates to third birth have typically remained highest among the low-educated (Impicciatore & Zuanna, 2017; Wood et al., 2014).
Educational and regional differences in family size variation and in the share of two-child families
The existing evidence suggests that in the late ‘expansion’ phase of the two-child family model, there was an East–West divide in parity-specific fertility trends (Frejka & Sardon, 2007; Van Bavel et al., 2018; Zeman et al., 2018). The West usually saw substantial declines in parity progression ratios to third births—in other words: the spread of ‘stopping-at-two’ behaviour—and mild decreases in the transition rates to first and second child. By contrast, the developments in the East were dominated by increases in ‘progression-towards-two’ behaviour (see a graphical summary of the expected developments in Table 1). On both sides of the Iron Curtain, the parity-specific developments resulted in a weakening variation of the family size and in its further convergence towards two children. We expect that these developments were fairly similar across educational strata, as at that time educational divergence in life trajectories had not set about yet.
Table 1 Summary of expected developments in parity progression ratios (PPR01, PPR12 and PPR23—black thick arrows) and their effects on the share of two-child families (grey thin arrows) in the ‘late-expansion’ and the ‘post-expansion’ phases, by educational group and region For reasons described in the previous section, we anticipate an increase in the variation of family size across and within countries and educational strata in the ‘post-expansion’ phase. The only fairly universal trend was the rise in childlessness, seen in low-fertility countries since the 1940s birth cohorts and starting later only in the post-socialist countries (Beaujouan et al., 2016). The strongest increases in childlessness have been experienced in the German-speaking and Southern European countries, i.e. in cultures which adhere to a traditional family pattern, with mothers caring for children at home and fathers providing for their families, and where opportunity costs of motherhood are thus particularly high (Anxo et al., 2011; Baizán, 2009; De Rose et al., 2008; Klüsener et al., 2013; Pailhé et al., 2019). In these two regions, childlessness has a clear positive educational gradient, and women have adopted the ‘child-free lifestyle’ and the ‘culture of childlessness’ more often than anywhere else in Europe (Klüsener et al., 2013; Sobotka & Testa, 2008). In Southern Europe, childlessness rates are further pushed up by the economic difficulties (Impicciatore & Zuanna, 2017).
Another stronghold of traditional model of gender roles within the family are the post-socialist countries. Under state socialism, the pressure to become a parent was very strong, and further increased by pronatalist measures such as easier access to independent housing for families with children or subsidised products and services for children (Baban, 1999; Frejka, 1980; Haney, 2002; Stloukal, 1999). As a result, over nine in ten women born between 1940 and the late 1950s became mothers (Beaujouan et al., 2016; Brzozowska, 2015). After the collapse of communism, among women born in the late 1950s and later, childlessness began to rise, especially among women with low and high education. Compared to other countries, however, it has remained lower and less socially accepted.
The flip side of universally low childlessness in the East were decreasing progression ratios to second birth among women born past 1955. The decrease was particularly sharp in economically weaker Eastern European countries, e.g. in Russia, Belarus or Ukraine (Zeman et al., 2018). It seems that in response to the continuously high pressure to become a mother on the one hand, and to the double burden of a traditional division of housework combined with female full-time employment on the other, women who were not solely family-oriented often opted for one child (Brzozowska, 2015; Frejka, 2008; Sobotka & Testa, 2008; Merz and Liefbroer, 2012). This pattern must have strengthened after 1989, first because the unstable and demanding labour market raised women’s opportunity cost of having children (Avdeev & Monnier, 1995; Philipov et al., 2006; Sobotka, 2011), and second because parental aspirations for children’s educational and financial success shot up in the middle-class while household budgets, even among professionals, remained tight (Thornton & Philipov, 2009). Therefore, we expect that the declines in transition rates to second birth have been largest among women with high and, most of all, medium education.
Steady declines in the transition rates to second birth have been observed also in Southern Europe (Frejka, 2008; Zeman et al., 2018) and were most probably fuelled by similar factors as the rises in childlessness. By contrast, in the German-speaking countries, the transition rates to second birth have remained largely stable for decades (Kreyenfeld, 2002; Zeman et al., 2018). In the English-speaking countries as well as in Northern and Western Europe, the figures tend to mildly decrease or to plateau, and do not show any substantial educational differentiation (Breton & Prioux, 2009; Frejka, 2008; Wood et al., 2014; Zeman et al., 2018).
The trends in the transition rates to third birth have shown steep declines in Southern Europe and more moderate ones in Western Europe and in the English- and German-speaking countries. In Central-Eastern Europe, the figures remained low and steady, whereas in Northern Europe they have been on the rise since the early 1950s birth cohorts (Frejka, 2008; Zeman et al., 2018). These population-level developments may mask considerable educational differences. For instance, we expect that the progression ratios to third birth have actually increased among low-educated women in countries where the group of low educated has shrunk to very small numbers and has become very selected, e.g. in most of Northern as well as Central-Eastern Europe and in Germany and the United States (Jalovaara et al., 2018; Zeman et al., 2014). A different kind of selection effect—selection into the group of mothers who have progressed to second birth—may have also led to increases in transition rates to third birth among women with university education in countries like Germany or Central-Eastern Europe.
A summary of our expectations is presented in Table 1. It shows the expected developments in parity progression ratios (PPRs) to first (PPR01), second (PPR12) and third (PPR23) births—black thick arrows—along with their effects on the share of two-child families—grey thin arrows—across education in the ‘late-expansion’ and the ‘post-expansion’ phases. For the sake of simplicity and brevity, it shows the five analysed regions rather than individual countries, which may result in some oversimplifications in some cases (i.e. some countries may have experienced slightly different developments than the regions they are grouped into).