Fertile imaginations: young men’s reproductive attitudes and preferences

Abstract

Background: Declining fertility rates are often attributed to lack of interest in having children by new generations of men and women. However, the extent to which fertility decline is the result of entirely unconstrained personal choice is open to question. While there is a growing body of research demonstrating that young women continue to value having children, young men’s perspectives remain relatively unexamined. Objective: This article aimed to contribute to understanding of contemporary fertility trends by investigating the reproductive attitudes and preferences of young adult men. Methods: 399 single, childless, Australian men aged 18–25 years completed a survey which measured their desired number of children, personal importance of fatherhood and identified reasons for and against having a child. An open‐ended question also assessed participants’ perceptions of the fatherhood role in the context of their future lives. Results: The overwhelming majority of men (96%) wanted to have children, and these men rated the reasons for fatherhood as significantly more influential than the reasons against parenthood. Among men that wanted to remain childfree (4%), the reasons for and against parenthood were rated as equally important. Difficulties in fulfilling the ‘ideal’ fatherhood role (for example, effectively combining involved fatherhood with obligations to provide for the family) were anticipated by many men and were a source of considerable concern. Conclusions: Overall, the men surveyed tended to place a high, positive value on having children, providing further evidence of misalignment between declining fertility rates and the preferences of young women and men.

Keywords:

• father/s
• attitudes
• reproduction
• fertility
• qualitative methods

Acknowledgement

We thank Aleena Wojcieszek for her support in preliminary data analysis.

Notes

1. The original full version of the scale contained 35 items. Based on pilot testing, two items (‘My partner would be pleased if I had a child’ and ‘Because my partner does not want a child’) were removed from the scale because of low relevance to unpartnered individuals. A further item (‘So that in my old age I would have someone to care about me’) was inadvertently removed. Notably, none of these omitted reasons were expressed by participants in the ‘other’ open‐ended reasons provided.