Rising nonmarital first childbearing among college-educated women: Evidence from three national studies

What is driving the global decline of human fertility? Need for a multidisciplinary approach to the underlying mechanisms

An intense period of human population expansion over the past 250 years is about to cease. Total fertility rates are falling dramatically all over the world such that highly industrialized nations, including China and the tiger economies of SE Asia, will see their populations decline significantly in the coming decades. The socioeconomic, geopolitical and environmental ramifications of this change are considerable and invite a multidisciplinary consideration of the underlying mechanisms. In the short-term, socioeconomic factors, particularly urbanization and delayed childbearing are powerful drivers of reduced fertility. In parallel, lifestyle factors such as obesity and the presence of numerous reproductive toxicants in the environment, including air-borne pollutants, nanoplastics and electromagnetic radiation, are seriously compromising reproductive health. In the longer term, it is hypothesized that the reduction in family size that accompanies the demographic transition will decrease selection pressure on high fertility genes leading to a progressive loss of human fecundity. Paradoxically, the uptake of assisted reproductive technologies at scale, may also contribute to such fecundity loss by encouraging the retention of poor fertility genotypes within the population. Since the decline in fertility rate that accompanies the demographic transition appears to be ubiquitous, the public health implications for our species are potentially devastating.

Racial/Ethnic Variation in the Relationship Between Educational Assortative Mating and Wives' Income Trajectories

Prior work has examined the relationship between educational assortative mating and wives' labor market participation but has not assessed how this relationship varies by race/ethnicity. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we estimate group-based developmental trajectories to investigate whether the association between educational assortative mating and wives' income trajectories varies by race/ethnicity. The presence, prevalence, and shapes of prototypical long-term income trajectories vary markedly across racial/ethnic groups. Whites are more likely than Blacks and Hispanics to follow income trajectories consistent with a traditional gender division of labor. The association between educational assortative mating is also stronger for Whites than for Blacks and Hispanics. White wives in educationally hypogamous unions make the greatest contribution to the couple's total income, followed by those in homogamous and hypergamous unions. Black and Hispanic wives in hypogamous unions are less likely than their peers in other unions to be secondary earners. These findings underscore the need for studies of the consequences of educational assortative mating to pay closer attention to heterogeneity across and within racial/ethnic groups.

Fast Track intervention effects on family formation

The present study examines whether the Fast Track (FT) intervention, a 10-year randomized controlled trial with children at risk for conduct problems, affects family formation in adulthood, as indexed by partnerships, parenthood, and family structure, and whether the intervention effect differs across participants' gender and race/ethnicity. Participants included 891 children (intervention n = 445; control n = 446; 69% male; 51% Black, 47% White) who were recruited in kindergarten and followed to age 32 or 34 (80% participation of still-living participants), when they reported on their romantic partnerships, parenthood, and family structure. Controlling for numerous covariates that are related to family formation, intervention participants were more likely than those in the control group to be married rather than single and to have a larger number of children; the intervention and control groups did not differ on cohabitation status, age at first marriage, whether they had ever been divorced, their likelihood of being a parent, the age at which they first became a parent, the spacing of births, family structure (partnered or not, with or without children), or in whether they were residentially independent of their parents and grandparents. Intervention effects were not moderated by gender, but race/ethnicity moderated the effect of the intervention on the probability of having any children and the number of children. These findings suggest that several elements of family formation may remain unchanged by an intervention that changes many other behavioral and psychological trajectories of participants. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).