Journal article
Trends and levels in men's and women's fertility goals in the United States
- Abstract:
- Understanding trends in fertility goals (attitudes, desires, intentions, etc.), as well as variation by age and parity, is important for understanding current U.S. fertility and assessing likely future outcomes. Both men's and women's childbearing goals shape fertility behavior. However, most research on fertility goals focuses on women, and little is known about how men's fertility goals may have changed over time or vary by age and parity. In this paper, we draw from the U.S. National Survey of Family Growth 2011-2019 to estimate trends in age- and parity-specific indicators for both men and women of (i) the proportion of positive prospective fertility intentions, (ii) the timing of prospective fertility intentions, and (iii) the retrospective reporting of fertility desires. Results show important differences and similarities in men's and women's fertility goals, as well as a mixed picture regarding gender convergence or divergence in fertility goals, depending on the exact outcome analyzed. Men are more likely to intend a(nother) child and have greater intentions to delay childbearing, both at the aggregate and across age and parity. Prospective intentions declined for both men and women, but at a higher rate for women, and the declines were proportionally larger early in the life course. For both men and women, we find increases in intended childlessness and intentions to delay childbearing. These two processes together point to potential future declines in cohort fertility, both through unrealized fertility and voluntary childlessness. We conclude by discussing the benefits and challenges of including men in fertility research.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.4MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s11113-025-09989-5
Authors
+ Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
More from this funder
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/04byxyr05
- Grant:
- P2CHD058484
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Population Research and Policy Review More from this journal
- Volume:
- 45
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 6
- Place of publication:
- Netherlands
- Publication date:
- 2026-01-22
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-12-23
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1573-7829
- ISSN:
-
0167-5923
- Pmid:
-
41583538
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
2446968
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2446968
- Source identifiers:
-
W7125381808
- Deposit date:
-
2026-07-28
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Badolato and Hayford
- Copyright date:
- 2026
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2026. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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