Partnership Histories and Social Fatherhood as Pathways into Childlessness among Men

Axel Peter Kristensen , University of Oslo
Trude Lappegard , University of Oslo

In this paper we investigate the relationship between partnership histories, social fatherhood, and childlessness among men. Partnership status and histories are substantial predictors of childlessness, but by only focusing on biological parenthood, we ignore significant family ties where childless individuals are included into pre-existing families through social parenthood. It is an open question whether social fathering is a pathway into childlessness or not, and we aim to extend the existing focus on partnership histories as predictors for childlessness by also including social fatherhood when distinguishing between different partnership histories. For this study we use administrative register data for all men living in Norway during the period 2006-2020. In 2006, information about couples cohabitating without a joint child was included in the registers. To identify patterns in partnership histories including social fathering, data will be organized into clusters using sequence analysis. To estimate the relationship between partnership histories and the probability of remaining childless, we run linear probability models using the probability of being childless at age 40 as the dependent variable. To test whether the relationship between partnership histories is moderated by educational attainment and employment career instability, we will include an interaction between the two separately and partnership histories. This study can shed light on why male childlessness is increasing. It can also provide us with new insights into how social fathering as part of the partnership histories influences the probability of remaining childless, and whether socio economic disadvantages or economic provider ability moderate such relationships.

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 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe