A life course perspective on childlessness

In the recent decades, childlessness has become an increasing worldwide phenomena. In fact, only about three per cent of the world's population now live in countries that have not experienced fertility decline (Barry et al., 2019). Many developed countries have undergone or are undergoing a massive fertility transition, shifting from high to low fertility rates (Hadley and Newby, 2019). In Europe, for instance, childlessness is an increasing phenomena among recent British birth cohorts and across other European countries (Baudin et al., 2019). According to a recent report from the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS, 2016) at the age of 45.18% of British women are childless. Of those born in 1971, 18 per cent were childless in 2016, when they turned 45. The same applies to many other countries, such the USA in which the percentage of childlessness has doubled to reach 20% in the mid-2000s compared to only 10% in the mid-1970s (Beaujouan and Berghammer, 2019). Moreover, a recent report shows that fertility rates has declined by 9% between the years 2007 to 2011 in the USA (ibid). This sharp increase in childlessness rates has recently become an issue of concern and attracted the attention of many government officials, researchers, and academics to investigate this highly pressing issue and the reasons behind it.

This proposal aims to identify the life course trajectories that lead to childlessness among men and women and to explore the life course consequences of remaining childless. In this dissertation the life course perspective is used to study the pathways into and the outcomes of a childless life. The life course perspective argues that decisions concerning major life course events are shaped by an individual's past experiences, a process labelled "cumulative contingencies'(Keizer, 2010). This notion emphasizes the use of life histories to make sense of the causes of childlessness. How long individuals were in education, whether and when people entered work, became partnered, or ended a partnership may be very useful for understanding why people remained childless (Moller and Clarke, 2016).

By examining the impact of childlessness, I aim to shed some light on the extent to which childless individuals have weaker ties with society compared with people who have children. The research questions are as follow:
RQ1: what is the influence of the educational, the marital, and the occupational pathways on the likelihood of remaining childless?
RQ2:is there any significant differences between in the influence of the educational, the marital, and the occupational pathways on the likelihood of remaining childless?
RQ3:what is the differences between childless individuals and parents in terms of their feelings of familial responsibility?
RQ4: What is the impact of childlessness on the wellbeing of men and women?

In order to answer the research questions proposed in this study, different empirical methods will be conducted. To answer the first and second research questions of describing the different paths to childlessness, I initially use sequence analysis. In the third research question, the familial responsibilities will be used as a dependent variable which has two types of norms relating to familial responsibility; universal and personal norms. For the forth research question that investigates the consequences of childlessness on the wellbeing, I will use the growth curve models of the trajectories of well-being over time for individuals of different birth cohorts who remain or do not remain childless. Finally, in this study I will investigate the parental effects on family behaviour such as intergenerational transmission; that is, whether children show the same family behaviour as their parents.