Childbearing motivation at the onset of emerging adulthood

ABSTRACT

Teenagers’ motivations and desires related to parenthood are important for their reproductive behavior in their teens and also constitute the origin of their future childbearing choices. The study investigates which perceived consequences of childbearing are the strongest predictors of desire to have children in the future, among late teens, at the onset of emerging adulthood. In a sample of 1803 Polish men and women (ages 18–20), their desire for children can be explained by their perceptions of the drawbacks of child care and the emotional values of children, mostly related to infancy. For men, the satisfaction of raising a child was also important. For women, traditional and instrumental values of children play a significant role, suggesting some normative influences. The relationship between fears related to children’s future well-being and childbearing desire was more complex, moderated by other perceived costs of children. Based on a small follow-up study (n = 107), we provided the first tentative evidence on the stability of childbearing motivations and desires over the transition to adulthood.

KEYWORDS:

• Childbearing desire
• childbearing motivation
• parenthood
• emerging adulthood

Acknowledgements

We are sincerely grateful to Rennie Miller for his invaluable support of our work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Statistics Poland database http://swaid.stat.gov.pl/, Education, access date 01.03.2020. Eurostat database https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database, Fertility indicators, access date 01.03.2020. The primary data analyzed in this paper are made available under CC0 license at https://osf.io/vgaj4/, DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/VGAJ4.

Notes

1 When variable were entered in blocks (step 1: control variables, step 2: childbearing motivations), control variables explained only 0.7% of variance for men and 1.1% – for women.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the National Science Centre (Poland) [grant number: 2015/17/B/HS4/02086].