Since most childbearing takes place while living with a partner, changes in the length of time spent in these unions can impact fertility rates. For instance, waiting to date and move in together, as well as higher divorce and separation rates could reduce how many years women and men spend in co-residential relationships. Have these changes in union dynamics resulted in less time for childbearing?
In a paper just out at Social Inclusion, Sunnee Billingsley and Livia Oláh (Stockholm University) calculate changes in time spent in co-residential relationships during women’s twenties across 11 post-socialist countries. Whether this is a potential explanation for the pronounced fertility decline in the region is important when policymakers must formulate comprehensive policy approaches to address low fertility.
Across these countries, they show that increasingly fewer women are entering a co-residential union by age 30 and fewer women remain in their first co-residential union at that age. But differences exist in how the timing of first co-residential partnerships has developed. For Central and South-eastern European countries, continually postponing living together with a partner has generally amplified the loss of childbearing time. In Hungary, for example, union formation delay, abstention and instability together resulted in an average loss of more than two years spent in a co-residential union during women’s twenties. In most of the former Soviet Republics, the number of years spent in a co-residential partnership remained relatively unchanged because a period of earlier or stable timing of moving in together compensated for other patterns.
To conclude the study, the authors indicate that a higher share of people who are single or stay single longer during their twenties must not result in lower fertility patterns if they form co-residential unions in their thirties. However, a later start to childbearing also means fewer years for women to have children.