Why Childless Men and Women Give Up on Having Children

In this paper we address the question why childless women and men aged 35 years and older, who originally were considering having children, voluntarily gave up on having children. We hypothesise that this adjustment could be attributed to five mechanisms: adaptation to a lifestyle without children; resignation because of severe hindrances to having children; approaching the end of the fecund period; perceiving a low degree of social influence from significant others to have children; and a low degree of personal persistence in pursuing life goals. We analyse data from the first six waves of the German Family Panel (Pairfam) and employ multinomial logistic regression models. As the dependent variable we distinguished four types of sequences over the observation period: "permanently considering having children", "given up on having children", "switching", and "permanently not considering having children". Being female, being not employed, and having low scores on the emotional autonomy scale increased the likelihood of giving up on having children, while anticipating positive consequences of parenthood and perceiving influence from parents to have a child decreased it. The results show that all mechanisms addressed by the hypotheses were at work to a certain extent. In particular, the integration of personality factors and the importance of other life goals beyond parenthood provided valuable insights into the reasons for giving up on having children. Future research in this field should focus more than was possible in our study on societal age norms and the role of partners in giving up on having children.