A large body of literature has documented a negative correlation between teenage childbearing and teen mothers’ socioeconomic outcomes, yet researchers continue to disagree as to whether the association represents a true causal effect. This article extends the extant literature by employing propensity score matching with a sensitivity analysis using Rosenbaum bounds. The analysis of recent coho...

CONTEXT Childbearing intentions vary by race and ethnicity and by relationship type. However, few studies have examined whether they differ by race and ethnicity within relationship type. METHODS Data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study were used to examine the childbearing intentions of 9,100 mothers of a cohort of children born in 2001. Multivariate and multinomial regression analys...

Fertility transition in China deviates from the classical model in two ways. First, fertility decline in China was extraordinarily rapid with low level of socio-economic development; second, the change has been from a high fertility regime to a low and sex-selective pattern of childbearing. The two processes are directly the result from China’s family planning program, which is the most stringe...

Based on data from the European Social Survey (2018), this paper examines ideas about ideal age to become a parent in 28 countries. Using multi-level models, it assesses impact of real timing childbirth and childlessness acceptance at country level while controlling for individual characteristics. The findings show that variability is relatively limited correlates significantly with childbearin...

CONTEXT Much of the debate over welfare reauthorization centers on whether marriage promotion should play a key role. Few studies, however, have tracked the marriage and divorce histories of unwed mothers, including minority women, who are often the main targets of welfare reform. METHODS Data from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth were used to estimate the hazards of the transition t...

The Nordic population registers provide a unique possibility to study the demographic behavior of very small population groups and rare events. In this paper, we study the childbearing behavior of Swedish mothers of twins between 1961 and 1999, inclusive. Our most consistent finding is that mothers of twins wait noticeably longer than women with singletons before they have another child. This a...

BACKGROUND Women in high-resource countries often postpone childbearing. Postponed childbearing may lead to increased health risks for both mother and child and may also result in childlessness. Attitudes among men and women about fertility and childbearing have been studied in different phases of fertile life, but instruments that assess attitudes toward fertility and childbearing among women ...