Elsevier

Advances in Life Course Research

Volume 21, September 2014, Pages 101-112
Advances in Life Course Research

Fertility after repartnering in the Netherlands: Parenthood or commitment?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.alcr.2013.08.003Get rights and content

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on childbearing after the dissolution of the first marital union. The discussion of what drives fertility decisions after dissolution has been largely dominated by the arguments that: (a) people want to have a child as a way to achieve the adult status of parenthood (the “parenthood hypothesis”), and that (b) a shared child can signal the partners’ commitment to each other (the “commitment hypothesis”). Earlier studies have reported mixed findings for these hypotheses. We used couple data from several Dutch surveys (N = 8094 couples of which 10.2% included a repartnering partner) and utilized a new analytical approach to test the commitment proposition in particular. Our main findings lend support to the parenthood hypothesis when it comes to men's transition to a union-specific birth and to the commitment hypothesis when considering women's transition. Whereas for men, children from a prior union decrease the likelihood of transitioning to a union-specific birth, for women children from a prior union do not matter. That is, women would find it important to confirm the union as a family despite the presence of children. Additional support for the commitment hypothesis for women is that being in a second union rather than first union increases chances of parity progression.

Section snippets

Fertility decisions in first and higher order unions

The discussion of what drives fertility decisions has been largely dominated by the argument that people want to have a child as a way to achieve the adult status of parenthood (the so-called “parenthood hypothesis”) and the argument that a shared child can confirm the couple's status as a family and signal the partners’ commitment to each other (the so-called “commitment hypothesis”; Griffith et al., 1985, Vikat et al., 1999). In first unions, these individual and couple considerations

The current study

The main goal in the current study is to test the parenthood and commitment hypotheses in a new way with detailed, couple data from several Dutch multi-actor studies. The studies include comparable information for both partners in the current union concerning their pre-union parental and marital statuses, as well as, information on the ages of their children. With these data we examine the transition to first common birth in higher order unions (i.e., unions which follow the dissolution of the

Participants and procedure

For this study we combined several Dutch surveys: the Households in the Netherlands 1995 survey (Huishoudens in Nederland 1995, HiN95; Weesie, Kalmijn, Bernasco, & Giesen, 1995), the first wave of the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (NKPS; Dykstra et al., 2005), and three of the repeated cross-sectional waves of the Family Survey of the Dutch Population (1998, 2003, and 2009; Familie-enquête Nederlandse Bevolking, FNB; de Graaf, de Graaf, Kraaykamp, & Ultee, 1998, 2003; Kraaykamp, Wolbers, &

Measures

The dependent variable in this study (i.e., union-specific birth) was a binary indicator taking the value of 1 in the month when a birth occurred in the current union and 0 otherwise. In the cases when both partners had reported the birthdates of the children from the current union, we used the dates reported by the female partner (all FNB surveys). In the NKPS the birthdates were only reported by the primary respondent for the study (which was the female partner in 55.9% of the unions which

Analytical approach

We performed two main sets of analyses, one addressing our two questions with respect to the parenthood hypothesis and one addressing the commitment hypothesis. For the parenthood hypothesis, we used discrete-time event-history analysis (Allison, 1982, Yamaguchi, 1991) to examine if the partners’ parental statuses prior to the current union affected the transition to the first union-specific birth in the new union. The data were organized in a couple-period format where each row of the dataset

Results

Of the 8094 unions which we observed, 6894 (or 85.2%) were marriages at the time of the interview and 1197 were cohabitations/registered partnerships. In the majority of cases, both partners were never married before (n = 7270 or 89.8%) whereas 824 unions (or 10.2%) included at least one repartnering individual. The correlation between the partners’ ages at the start of the relationship was r = 0.75 for the unions with two never-before-married individuals and r = 0.53 for the couples with one

Discussion

In this work, we examined how the transition to having a common child in a union was affected by the earlier marital and parental statuses of the partners. As has been previously elaborated, fertility decisions are likely to be driven by the desire to have a child as a way to achieve the adult status of parenthood (the “parenthood hypothesis”) but also by the wish to signal the partners’ commitment to each other (the “commitment hypothesis”; Griffith et al., 1985, Vikat et al., 1999). We

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