Postponement and childlessness - Evidence from two British cohorts

By D. Kneale, H. Joshi. 2008

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper starts by reviewing existing projections of childlessness among British men and women. Low current fertility implies high eventual childlessness unless the postponement of parenthood is taken into account. Such re-timing of first births appears to be occurring differentially across social groups. Exploiting the disaggregated evidence of two British cohort studies, the 1958 National Child Development Study and the 1970 British Cohort Survey, this paper investigates the extent of postponement across cohorts and projects its impact on eventual levels of childlessness. Men and women are considered separately in our models of a population stratified by educational attainment. We find the most striking postponement occurring among graduate men. Among graduate women, after taking family building intentions into account, we estimate that about a quarter of 1970 born graduate women will remain childless, rather than something nearer 40 per cent as had been conjectured elsewhere.

Subfields: Demography, Management Science and Operations Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c1b1cb04fc9d9df0562c1baac1cd88c34a60c225

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. M. Mills
2. Ronald R. Rindfuss
3. E. T. te Velde
4. P. McDonald
5. Jane Falkingham
6. J. Stone
7. Ann M. Berrington
8. A. Gauthier

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. P. McDonald
2. Ronald R. Rindfuss
3. M. Mills
4. E. T. te Velde

In Sociology and Political Science

1. M. Mills
2. P. McDonald
3. Ronald R. Rindfuss
4. Jane Falkingham
5. J. Stone
6. Ann M. Berrington
7. E. T. te Velde
8. Tomas Kögel

Citations in the corpus

• Why do people postpone parenthood? Reasons and social policy incentives. (2011, background): “In addition to competing with education and employment aspirations, parenthood has increasingly become an issue of personal preference, involving such possibilities as voluntary childlessness and postponement until a period in life when raising children is more consistent with women’s chosen career ”
• The changing determinants of UK young adults' living arrangements (2011, background): “The longer young adults remain in education, the longer they are likely to delay family formation (Kneale and Joshi 2008).”