Sibship size and status attainment across contexts: Evidence from the Netherlands, 1840-1925

Abstract

Abstract This paper investigates the effects of sibship size on status attainment across different contexts and subgroups. Resource dilution theory predicts that with larger sibship size, children's status outcomes fall. However, the empirical record has shown that this is not always the case. In this paper we have tested three alternative hypotheses for neutral or even positive effects of sibship size on status attainment on the basis of a large-scale registry database covering the period of industrialization and fertility decline in the Netherlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century. Our findings offer support for the family developmental cycle, buffering by kin groups, and socio-economic development as alternative explanations to the resource dilution hypothesis. 1. Introduction What is the role of family structure in society? How, in particular, does the configuration of siblings influence how children's lives turn out? Contemporary research on status attainment in Western societies, whether it is geared to measuring educational achievement, intelligence, or occupational attainment, consistently demonstrates a strong negative impact of the sibship size of the family of origin on accomplishments later in life (Blake 1981, 1989; Conley 2005; Davis 1997; Downey 1995; Kasarda and Billy 1985; Steelman et al. 2002). With an increasing number of siblings, children's status outcomes consistently fall. This record of empirical evidence confirms the resource dilution explanation - the most widely accepted theory used to explain the relationships between the basic parameters of the sibling group and children's outcomes. The resource dilution model dates back to the law of capillary action, framed by Arsene Dumont in 1890 and stating that the presence of siblings attenuates resources necessary for social mobility. Developed in a period of demographic transition, Dumont's idea was that when parents wanted their children to be upwardly mobile, they needed to control their fertility and limit their family size. Hence, they would have to trade quantity for quality (Dumont 1890). The resource dilution hypothesis basically depicts the family as a unit that distributes valuable resources to children and this process has implications for children's status outcomes. The amount of resources that can be allocated to any given child depends both on the amount of resources in the family, and on the number of children. The larger the family is, the greater the dilution of resources and therefore the lower the eventual status of the child (Becker 1991; Downey 2001; Steelman et al. 2002). However, over the past decades, a number of studies have presented contradictory evidence. The negative effect of sibship size on child outcomes has been found to be much weaker, neutral or even positive in some developing societies (Buchmann and Hannum 2001; Desai 1995; Eloundou-Enyegue and Williams 2006; Gomes 1984; Hermalin, Seltzer and Lin 1982; Lu and Treiman 2008; Maralani 2008; Razzaque, Streatfield and Evans 2007; Sudha 1997; Yu and Su 2006). Moreover, historical research (Adams and Kasakoff 1992; Van Bavel 2005; Wall 1996), as well as some older sociological work on social class differences in the relation between family size and status attainment (Bayer 1967; Elder 1962), provides evidence that partly refutes the resource dilution hypothesis. These ambiguous findings suggest that there might be different mechanisms at work in the sibship size-child outcome relationship, depending on social-cultural context or subgroup membership. In the literature on sibship size, different explanations have been put forward, ranging from the developmental cycle of the household (Desai 1995), to buffering by extended kin groups (Shavit and Pierce 1991), social institutions (Blake 1989), public policies (Park 2008), and changes in the relationship over the course of socioeconomic development and demographic transition (Maralani 2008; Van Bavel 2005). …