Abstract
How persistent and universal has the two child family ideal been in Europe during the last three decades? We analyze responses of women of reproductive age from 168 surveys conducted in 37 countries in 1979–2012. A two‐child ideal has become nearly universal among women in all parts of Europe. Countries that used to display higher ideal family size have converged over time toward a two‐child model. Six out of ten women in Europe consider two children as ideal, and this proportion is very similar in different regions. The mean ideal family size has become closely clustered around 2.2 in most countries. Gradual shifts can be documented toward more women expressing an ideal of having one child (and, quite rarely, having no children) and a parallel decline in an ideal of three or more children. An increasing number of European countries saw their mean ideal family size falling to relatively low levels around 1.95–2.15. However, with the exception of one survey for eastern Germany and two of the surveys not included in our study owing to high nonresponse or low sample size, none of the analyzed surveys suggests a decline in mean ideal family size to levels considerably below replacement, i.e., below 1.9 children per woman.
Highlights
Completed fertility rates in most of the highly developed countries fell below two children per woman already among the women born in the 1960s (Frejka and Sobotka 2004; Myrskylä et al 2013), supporting the view that fertility transition does not abruptly come to an end when fertility reaches a replacement-level threshold (Demeny 1997)
We first inspect changes in ideal family size and the share of women expressing a two-child ideal across Europe, computing selected key indicators for the pool of all analysed surveys combined in the period 1979-2012
While a two-child ideal firmly prevails today all over Europe, the gradual decline in mean ideal family size was fuelled by a declining share of women with an ideal of three or more children, accompanied by a slower increase in the share of women expressing a sub-replacement ideal of
Summary
Completed fertility rates in most of the highly developed countries fell below two children per woman already among the women born in the 1960s (Frejka and Sobotka 2004; Myrskylä et al 2013), supporting the view that fertility transition does not abruptly come to an end when fertility reaches a replacement-level threshold (Demeny 1997). In order to compensate for the small sample size in most surveys, we conducted additional regional analyses, grouping the data for broader geographical regions that reflect major differences in fertility patterns across Europe (Sobotka 2013). We used the following regional groupings: The high share of respondents choosing the answer “There is no ideal number” in some of the Eurobarometer surveys provides a signal about the possible erosion of a notion that there might be a common ideal family size This issue is worth analysing deeper, but as it is not captured in the other surveys, we do not analyse these responses and treat them merely as “statistical noise” that may affect the aggregate results. - Southern Europe: Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. - “German-speaking countries”: Austria, eastern and western-Germany, Switzerland. - Central Europe: Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia. - Eastern and South-eastern Europe: Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Russian Federation, Serbia, and Ukraine
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