Couples’ fertility differentials by education: do stepchildren make a difference?

Abstract

A growing number of studies has explored both partners’ education as determinant of couples’ fertility, acknowledging the fact that the decision to have a child is couple based. Still, those studies have solely focused on children born to the couple, without considering stepchildren. As a result, in studying couples’ birth rates by educational pairing, previous studies did not account for the complexity of family composition, which also affects partners’ decision to have a common child. In this paper, we aim at tackling family complexity and its association with education. Using Generations and Gender Surveys (GGS) data of 14 European countries, we analyse the association between educational pairing and couples’ fertility based on different definitions of couples’ children. Applying standard fertility analysis, overall results show a decline in childlessness among younger cohorts when stepchildren are considered, with strong educational difference. We found that among the younger cohorts, highly educated homogamous couples have less often stepchildren (born from one partner before the union) and remain less often without shared children. Stepchildren, instead, are more common among low educated couples, and among the heterogamous couples. We also found diversity among heterogamous couples: there are fewer stepchildren when one partner is highly educated, stepchildren more often come from the woman, especially when she is low educated.