Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility

Item

Title

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility

Author

Bernardi, Laura

Research Area

Social Institutions

Topic

Marriage and the Family

Abstract

The intergenerational transmission of fertility has direct consequences on population dynamics and is indirectly related to the reproduction of social inequality. Early studies focused on the positive correlation of parents and children fertility outcomes such as family size or childbearing timing. Explanations for the observed correlations have spanned from genetic and social status inheritance mechanisms to role modeling and socialization processes based on social learning and social influence. More recently, the focus has shifted from fertility outcomes to similarities and dissimilarities of family formation patterns across generations, framing fertility in the context of interrelated life course trajectories. Recent cutting‐edge research has also expanded upon the existing literature by focusing on the role played by multigenerational relationships and by bidirectional influence processes in parents‐children fertility behaviors. Challenges for future research are provided by the need to disentangle the interplay between genes and culture in defining tastes and preferences for given values and norms related to fertility and the increasing family complexity and migration that interfere with socialization processes.

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Identifier

etrds0413

extracted text

The Intergenerational Transmission
of Fertility
LAURA BERNARDI

Abstract
The intergenerational transmission of fertility has direct consequences on population dynamics and is indirectly related to the reproduction of social inequality. Early
studies focused on the positive correlation of parents and children fertility outcomes
such as family size or childbearing timing. Explanations for the observed correlations have spanned from genetic and social status inheritance mechanisms to role
modeling and socialization processes based on social learning and social influence.
More recently, the focus has shifted from fertility outcomes to similarities and dissimilarities of family formation patterns across generations, framing fertility in the
context of interrelated life course trajectories. Recent cutting-edge research has also
expanded upon the existing literature by focusing on the role played by multigenerational relationships and by bidirectional influence processes in parents-children
fertility behaviors. Challenges for future research are provided by the need to disentangle the interplay between genes and culture in defining tastes and preferences for
given values and norms related to fertility and the increasing family complexity and
migration that interfere with socialization processes.

INTRODUCTION
Intergenerational transmissions from parents to children have been studied
in different domains such as educational attainment (Mare & Maralani,
2006), union formation (Thornton, 1991), divorce (Diekmann & Engelhardt,
1999), and fertility (Barber, 2000). Research on the intergenerational transmission of fertility consistently shows that fertility outcomes, such as family
size or the age at first birth of parents and children, are positively and
significantly correlated and such association does not appear to weaken
over time (Murphy, 1999). Similarly, evidence shows a persistent intergenerational correlation of fertility and family-related norms and values
(Axinn & Thornton, 1993; Bernardi, 2013). Theoretical explanations for
such associations are much debated in the literature. Fertility behavior and
preferences can be transferred from parents to children through heritable
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

dispositions and social positions or through socialization mechanisms.
Hot questions in the field, since its beginning, have been the relative
importance of genetic and social components of the transmission and the
conditions under which transmission is more effective. More recently,
attention has shifted on the object of the transmission itself (Should that
be a specific behavior or a series of life course choices leading to it?), the
salient pool of relevant kin (Do grandparents and parents’ siblings matter?),
the direction of the transmission (Does it only go downward from parents
to children or, in the case of fertility attitudes, values, and norms, can
it be bidirectional?), and the interplay of transmission mechanisms with
the larger social environment (Under which environmental conditions is
transmission more likely to be effective?). Advanced methods of statistical
analysis and the availability of large data sets of close kin and siblings
across several generations have been supporting these new research lines.
Understanding the mechanisms beyond continuities and discontinuities
in fertility across generations advances knowledge on the forces driving
social change. The intergenerational transmission of fertility represents
a special case of the many intergenerational transfers that occurs along
generational lines (Bengston, 2002): The fact that parents transfer genetic
and social makeup, as well as preferences, norms, and values, to children
has important implications on population dynamics and, consequently,
for social inequalities. This essay briefly summarizes the current state of
research limited to the sociological and demographic literature, highlighting
recent promising research avenues.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION
OF FERTILITY
The intergenerational correlation of fertility has been matter of study for
more than a century (Pearson, Lee, & Bramley-Moore, 1899). Research on
the intergenerational transmission of family and fertility behavior consistently shows that parental fertility histories are positively and significantly
correlated with those of their children and such association does not appear
to weaken over time (Murphy, 1999). In contraceptive populations, where
fertility behavior is deliberately and efficiently controlled, the level of
intergenerational transmission of fertility is even higher than in the past
and it is comparable, in magnitude, to the effect of educational level on
fertility (Murphy & Wang, 2002). It affects family size, but also the timing
of fertility (Barber, 2001). In addition to behavior, the literature on the
intergenerational transmission of fertility has explored the passing of
preferences, attitudes, norms, and values on what is an ideal life course,
family size, or childbearing timing that are correlated to the transmission

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility

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of behavior. Substantial evidence exists that attitudes toward family-related
behaviors are perpetuated through generations. Parental attitudes toward
timing of marriage and parenthood, as well as divorce, influence their
children’s family outcomes (van Bavel & Kok, 2009; van Poppel, Monden, &
Mandemakers, 2008). The strength of the influence depends on the exposure
time and the parent’s and the child’s gender (De Valk & Liefbroer, 2007).
Children’s fertility preferences, in terms of timing of childbearing, are
influenced by parental preferences and the latter may be more consequential
for the fertility behavior of children than children’s own preferences, even
more so than actual parents’ fertility behavior (Barber, 2000). Other norms
and ideals that could be transmitted from generation to generation are satisfaction and dissatisfaction with children or the need to live in a stable union.
Recent studies on register data showing that intergenerational associations
span multiple generations (net of parental effects) seem to suggest that the
transmission of norms on childbearing and family life plays an important
role in intergenerational association in fertility within families (Kolk, 2014).
TRANSMISSION MECHANISMS
Commonly evoked explanations for the intergenerational transmission of
fertility are genetic and socioeconomic heritability, early socialization, and
social influence during the reproductive ages. While often presented as competing, such explanations are potentially complementary.
GENETIC HERITABILITY
Parents and children share genetic dispositions that are influential for fertility behavior (Murphy, 1999). Much early research on intergenerational fertility was investigating heritability understood as the physiological ability
to have children. Early results supporting a genetic heritability were later
questioned and the genetic heritability of fecundity was put into doubt (e.g.,
L. A. Williams & B. J. Williams, 1974). The more recent studies looking at
genetic heritability of fertility use modern twin and siblings’ studies (Bras,
van Bavel, & Mandemakers, 2013), as well as general population samples
(Rodgers & Doughty, 2000), to estimate the magnitude of genetic and environmental factors involved in the transmission. Such studies have shown a
significant heritable component in the desire for children and motivation for
parenthood in the form of psychological dispositions related to genes (Miller,
1992) primarily relating to the timing of fertility (Rodgers et al., 2001). One
important mediator for the expression of genetic dispositions is the larger
social environment and the extent to which it affects genetic and behavioral

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variance. Empirical evidence shows that the lower the level of social constraints on fertility in a society, the larger the genetic influence on behavior.
Danish twin studies spanning through several cohorts between the end of the
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, before and after the
fertility transition in Denmark, show that the intergenerational transmission
of fertility was greater when deliberate decision-making in fertility choices
was larger and life course alternatives were more heterogeneous (Kendler,
2001).
SOCIOECONOMIC HERITABILITY
Parents and children may also act in similar ways because they have been
exposed to similar environmental influences and opportunity structures. As
education and occupational class are often correlated across generations,
occupying a common social position may produce status inheritance and
result in similar sets of preferences and normative beliefs for parents
and children (Moen, Erickson, & Dempster-McClain, 1997). However, if
structural conditions change dramatically or if intergenerational social
mobility is high, then the effects of status inheritance are low, despite close
relationships between parents and children. Sibling studies exploring the
effects of the family of origin on fertility outcomes show that, net of status
inheritance and parental socioeconomic and family structure characteristics,
siblings have significantly similar family formation patterns and fertility
outcomes (Bernardi & White, 2010; Lyngstad & Prskawetz, 2010; Murphy &
Knudsen, 2002). These results indicate that specific mechanisms occurring
within families may be a part of the explanation for the correlation between
parents and their children’s fertility.
SOCIALIZATION PROCESSES
The most fashionable explanation of the similarities in the trajectories of parents and children is early socialization (Amato, 1996). In particular, early socialization is the channel through which parents may pass to their children their
preferences, attitudes, norms, and values on what is an ideal life course, family size, or childbearing timing. Parents occupy a key position in their children’s social networks. First, children’s first exposure to others is generally
exposure to their parents. Second, the direct experience that children have
of the consequence of a given fertility behavior is within their family of origin and its structure. Last, parents have the means to exert social influence
throughout their children’s lives, whether economic transfer or emotional
means that act through subjective obligations (Bernardi & Oppo, 2008). Social
control and support in early childhood and adolescence are active ways in

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which parents influence their children. Parental beliefs may be transmitted
through disciplinary practices and conditional parental support. Qualitative
research provides support for the notion that network members endowed
with sanctioning power (i.e., parents) express their expectations regarding a
number of family and fertility transitions so that parents’ influence also is a
factor when their children move out and live independently (Bernardi, 2003).
Role modeling is involved when parents’ roles are reproduced by the children through passive internalization, rather than when purposive transmission is involved (Campbell, 1969). Children may also simply imitate what
they observe their parents’ preferences and behaviors to be and view them
as role models (Bandura, 2006). The efficacy of socialization in generating the
transmission of family-related norms and attitudes depends on the quality
of the social ties between parents and children (Risch, Jodl, & Eccles, 2004),
on the family structure and family context (van der Valk, Spruijt, de Goede,
Larsen, & Meeus, 2008), and in the case of attitudes and norms toward partnership, in the life course of the young adult children (Bucx, Raaijmakers, &
Van Wel, 2010).
IMPLICATIONS OF THE INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF FERTILITY
If the strength of the intergenerational transmission of fertility increases over
time, there may be important implications for low-fertility societies. First,
if children from larger families are more likely to reproduce their parents’
model, in the long run genetic dispositions or family preferences for large
family sizes shall outnumber those for smaller family sizes or childlessness.
The consequence may be measurable, in terms of fertility levels (Udry, 1996),
thus making it possible that fertility decline reverses, regardless of whether
intergenerational fertility transmission is the result of social or genetic factors. The increase in intergenerational transmission of fertility in contemporary societies also has consequences in terms of composition, size, and
structure of the kinship networks and, in particular, the redistribution of
children across families. Child-rich and child-poor families will attribute different social roles to the kin members and will have different opportunities
for caring for the elderly in contexts in which the welfare state is withdrawing
and the population is aging. Research in this area is far from being exhausted
and, in recent years, new avenues have been explored.
INNOVATIVE RESEARCH
In the following, I highlight three cutting-edge research directions that widen
the field of intergenerational transmission of fertility along the lines of what

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I like to call the multidimensional transmission, multigenerational transmission, and multidirectional transmission. For each of these directions I will
offer exemplary, rather than exhaustive, research cases.
MULTIDIMENSIONAL TRANSMISSION
While most research in the intergenerational transmission of fertility compares parents’ and their children’s fertility-specific outcomes such as family
size, age at birth, or interval between births, recent research integrates fertility
in a life course perspective and in a more general pattern of family transitions. In doing so, it explores systematic deviations from the average pattern
of behavior and contrasts family trajectories, rather than punctual outcomes.
The shift in perspective is justified by acknowledging that fertility is inscribed
in the life course made of several parallel trajectories and multiple events
(Elder, 2001). The starting point is the recognition that it is very unlikely that
parents focus on transmitting just a specific behavior to children, rather than
more generally on some guidelines for what they think constitutes a good
life. Instead of looking at correlations between fertility outcomes, the intergenerational links are examined by comparing children and parents’ family
formation by means of dyadic sequence analysis (Liefbroer & Elzinga, 2012).
Using data that refers to US parents’ generations (1923–1968) and children’s
generations (1968–1984), they confirm the occurrence of intergenerational
transmission of family life trajectories. On average, similarities between the
trajectories of parents and children depends, for 80%, on continuities in adulthood trajectories across generations (unrelated parents and children) rather
than within family transmission; however, related parents and children display larger similarities and 20% of the intergenerational transmission occurs
within families. The results indicate that the similarity in family trajectories
across generations is comparable to that within the children’s generation but
weaker than the similarity within the parents’ generation. Such patterns suggest that, even in times of rapid social change such as those lived through the
children’s cohorts in this study, the intergenerational transmission of demographic trajectories takes place.
Fasang and Raab (2014) take a step further in the multidimensional direction by using parent/children dyads as unit of analysis—as in the previous
study—but by applying it to multichannel sequence analysis to study intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in the life courses. The methodological choice allows for moving beyond the deviation from the average
pattern approach and describing multiple possible types of intergenerational
transmission. The innovative focus differs itself from a focus on similarity

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and puts it on regularities in parental influence on children’s family formation. Even in cases in which trajectories are not similar, if one can empirically show that parents’ family trajectories are systematically related to the
family behavior of their children, intergenerational influences are proved to
be at work. Within-family social mechanisms—operating on the individual,
dyadic, or societal level—may link a specific parental family behavior to a different family behavior among their children (Silverstein & Giarrusso, 2011).
Results from the US population of parents and children in the second half
of the twentieth century show three patterns of intergenerational transmission, classified according to the kind of transitions experienced by parents
and children and the timing of such transitions: moderately similar dyadic
patterns of transmission (same transitions but different timing), strongly similar ones (similar transitions and timing), and dyads of parents and children
with contrasting patterns (Fasang & Raab, 2014). When studying the determinants in sorting parent/children dyads into specific transmission patterns,
the major discriminant factors are within-family characteristics (the emotional bonds between parents and children and the child birth). Structural
changes in employment and education indicated by upward social mobility and gender equality result in delayed schedules to similar family formation patterns between parents and their children. The patterns show a
gender-specific bias in the likelihood of falling in the strong transmission
pattern: father–daughter dyads are more similar across successive US generations and fall into the strong transmission pattern, while mother–daughter
dyads only in the moderate one. Daughters’ lives more frequently follow
the rhythm of those of their fathers than those of their mothers. The authors
interpret this as a consequence of the rise in gender equality and the inroads
that women of the daughters’ generations have made into the labor market
(Fasang & Raab, 2014).
MULTIGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION
Most studies on the intergenerational transmission of fertility focused on
parents’ influence on their children’s fertility patterns. However, kin other
than parents, such as grandparents and parents’ siblings, may also influence
the observed correlation. That is the starting assumption of new studies
investigating the multigenerational transmission of fertility behavior.
Murphy and Wang (2002) had already found that, even after controlling
for family size in the middle generation, an association in fertility behavior
between grandparents and their grandchildren remains. Using Swedish
register data and focusing on young generations born between 1970 and
1982, Kolk (2014) investigates and finds independent effects of the fertility
of grandparents and of aunts and uncles on fertility. He excludes the

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

possibility that status inheritance would drive such effects as the association
of socioeconomic traits between grandchildren and their grandparents in
his data is almost entirely mediated by the middle generation.1 Such associations may work both through direct socialization between grandparents
and grandchildren, or through the acquisition of a preference or taste for
kinship and extended family networks that is acquired when the youngest
generation grows up.
Including three generations opens up new possibilities to better understand
how genetic makeup, socioeconomic traits, and family preferences are transmitted across generations and efforts to try to disentangle the underlying
mechanisms. The challenge for multigenerational studies, even more than
studies focusing solely on parents and children, is to account for the fact that
the fertility outcomes or family patterns span over long periods of time and
the interplay with the larger historical context (relative weight of the intergenerational transmission and of the environmental changes). The increase
in the expression of within-family transmission and a fading of environmental influences was found in previous research (Kohler, Rodgers, & Christensen, 1999). Such a finding was recently confirmed with Belgian historical data (Bras et al., 2013). Analyzing the differential fertility outcomes of
twin, siblings, and half-siblings, in order to have various degrees of genetic
relatedness and different socialization processes, the authors show that inheritabilities were more strongly expressed for cohorts living their reproductive
years after the onset of fertility decline, in the fertility behavior of women
who grew up in places that were characterized by a relatively liberal religious climate, urban context, low working conditions, or high social status
(Bras et al., 2013). All of the latter characteristics are symptomatic of contexts
where social control on reproduction is lower and, therefore, environmental
influences are lower as well.
MULTIDIRECTIONAL TRANSMISSION
The intergenerational transmission of fertility behavior assumes a clear
temporal sequence and causal direction that parents’ fertility patters are
the benchmark for their children’s fertility patterns. In the transmission
of fertility-related norms, the direction is less straightforward: Children’s
characteristics may affect parents’ normative beliefs because parents want
to adapt to their children’s behavior in order to accept it. The assumption in
intergenerational transmission is that parents wish to transmit a replica of
1. Research on the interdependency of class positions of grandparents and grandchildren is inconclusive. Some research shows that they are almost independent of each other, once parents’ social class has
been taken into account (Warren & Hauser, 1997); other than that, there is a net grandparents’ effect in
social mobility over three generations (Chan & Boliver, 2014).

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their own characteristics to their children. However, parents may be willing
to pass on values underlying norms, taking into account the different historical moments in which their children are living through their reproductive
years. Therefore, specific prescriptive and proscriptive fertility norms may
be flexible and adapted to different historical and geographical contexts.
Reciprocal influence between parents and children’s attitudes over time has
been observed in relation to norms about family traditionalism (van der
Valk et al., 2008), cohabitation (Axinn & Thornton, 1993), and childbearing
timing and family size (Bernardi, 2013). According to a perceived norms
perspective (Tam, 2015), parents may be purposively enforcing norms and
values that they think are best serving their children, regardless of what their
own norms or behavior may be or have been in the past. A critical reading
of the intergenerational transmission assumptions that parents transmit to
their children, the same norms and behavior that guided their own fertility,
is refreshing. Intergenerational transmission of fertility norms is possibly an
active construction in which parents, directed by their own goals (what they
perceive as their children’s future well-being), select and try to pass norms
that are coherent with their goals (Tam, 2015). Qualitative evidence shows
that this may be the case in contexts where the socioeconomic conditions of
women have dramatically changed in the space of one generation, such as
in the Italian region of Sardegna in the second half of the twentieth century:
Daughters report conversations with their mothers that explicitly tried
to turn them away from following their own mother’s family formation
choices (Bernardi & Oppo, 2008). This mechanism may explain part of the
contrasting patterns across generations observed by Fasang and Raab (2014).
RESEARCH AHEAD
The outlined multidimensional, multigenerational, and multidirectional
transmissions are inspiring directions for future research on the intergenerational transmission of fertility patterns. The following section outlines
two challenges to be met in this area of research in the next future, namely,
the interplay of environmental and genetic factors, the complexification
of socialization processes due to growing family diversity, and migration
movements that characterize most contemporary populations.
The first challenge comes from genetic studies and the recognition that
preferences for given norms, values, and tastes are partially dependent
on cognitive traits that are genetically passed from parents to children. A
genetic component may operate under the form of a cognitive preference
for large or small family size or other behavioral responses that relate to
childbearing. The relationship between genetic heritability and heritability
in socioeconomic traits and other aspects indirectly related to fertility, such

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as appearance, are already known (Tambs, Sundet, Magnus, & Berg, 1989).
There is growing evidence that there are genetic influences in values (Knafo
& Spinath, 2011; Schermer, Feather, Gu, & Martin, 2008). Genes influence
brain processes and translate into influence in the way in which individuals
think and pay attention to social and personal issues and, therefore, give
importance to given values (predisposed affinities between parents and children to be influenced by given norms). It is, therefore, plausible that genetic
heritability could explain various aspects of fertility heritability across
generations: health, a part of the heritability of fertility norms/preferences,
and a part of the heritability of socioeconomic norms related to fertility
decision-making. Some first evidence on genetic influences on fertility
analyzing first hand genome data points in this direction (Tropf et al., 2015).
Disentangling the ways in which these mechanisms are additive or interacting with socialization processes and with the social environment external to
the family is crucial to understanding the likelihood that intergenerational
transmission continue to increase or decline in the following decades.
The second challenge is represented by the changing nature of the
relationship between parents and children in times of increasing family
complexity (Carlson & Meyer, 2014). Family complexity is relevant because
of the proportion of divorce and separations among parents resulting in
repartnering and in family recomposition. Repartnering being increasingly
common in recent decades, it has changed the environmental conditions
for parent/child relationships. A number of step-parent/step-child relationships, with variable durations and kinds of contact, are created and
three—if not four—“parents” take over the responsibility of educating
the same child (Thomson, 2014). The childhood experiences of those with
step-parents and half-siblings are likely to be very different from other children. Most of our core research on intergenerational effects, especially work
focused on developed societies, is rooted in a paradigm of parent-to-child
or parent-to-adult offspring connections. With an increasing number of children experiencing multiple household transitions and living arrangements
and with step-parents taking a larger role in the education of children, the
vector of the transmission may change. Step-parenthood raises the question
of which parents count as socialization agents for which children and what
implications this has for that part of intergenerational transmission that is
channeled by role modeling, social influence, and social control. There is
suggestive evidence of flawed role modeling and socialization complexity
after family disruption. Buhr and Huinink (2015) find a decline in family
effects across cohorts, which may be attributed to the rectangularization of
fertility or to the fact that primary socialization processes and role modeling
became more complex. van der Valk et al. (2008) found that parental attitude
transmission is significantly lower in families after a divorce and explained

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it as the consequence of the failure of role modeling and of the growing
distance between parents and children.
The adoption of a multigenerational transmission perspective has to
account for the fact that divorces and separations of parents translate into
differential exposures to maternal and paternal kin. It is known that a share
of paternal grandparents lose contact with their grandchildren if the father
separates (Hagestad, 1985), even though exposure varies by the children’s
custody arrangements (Westphal, Poortman, & von der Lippe, 2015). What
are the consequences of shortened exposures to the biological father and his
kin during childhood for fertility transmission? Are they likely to produce
mother biases in the extent to which role models, fertility preferences, and
norms are passed on, from one generation to the other, whether through one
step or passing by more distant kin (grandparent and parents’ siblings)?
The third underexplored area of research is the interplay of migration
trajectories with intergenerational transmission of fertility. Research on
intergenerational transmission of family and fertility among migrants and
their children is rather limited (Brannen, 2015). Growing mobility and more
complex migration trajectories generally produce accelerated changes in the
social environment of those who are on the move. With the broadening of
social and cultural spaces of references, migration complicates generational
distance over time. Within populations where the share of parents who
are migrants increases, what are the consequence for intergenerational
transmission of values and norms of immigrants’ children? There is recent
and suggestive evidence that the transmission of norms about marriage
among migrants varies in comparison with nonmigrants, with an overall
intergenerational transmission stronger in native families and weaker in
migrant families (Baykara-Krumme, 2015). In the case of fertility, parents
may be more likely to invest actively in socializing their children if the
cultural traits they want to pass on are not prevalent (Soiliou & Roushdy,
2008) or they may want their children to adopt different behavior and
preferences in order to let them better and faster integrate in the majority.
Research on the intergenerational transmission of fertility will continue to
be an exciting field of research in the years to come, given the centrality of fertility for demographic dynamics and the reproduction of social inequalities.
Future researchers in the area will have to engage with the increasing complexity characterizing contemporary families, the new perspectives offered
by the examination of multigenerational data sets and multidimensional processes of transmission, and the insights coming from research in neighboring
disciplines such as social psychology, biology, and genetics to explain mechanisms at play in the correlation of fertility preferences and behaviors.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This publication is based on the research conducted at the Swiss National
Centre of Competence in Research LIVES—Overcoming vulnerability: Life
course perspectives, which is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. I wish to thank Elizabeth Thomson, Johannes Huinink, and the editors
of Emerging Trends for their critical reading of the early version of this essay
and their useful advice. All limitations remain the author’s full responsibility.

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Chan, T. W., & Boliver, V. (2014). Social mobility over three generations in Finland:
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De Valk, H. A. G., & Liefbroer, A. C. (2007). Timing preferences for women’s
family-life transitions: Intergenerational transmission among migrants and Dutch.
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Diekmann, A., & Engelhardt, H. (1999). The social inheritance of divorce: Effects
of parent’s family type in postwar Germany. American Sociological Review, 64(6),
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Elder, G. H., Jr., (2001). Life course: Sociological aspects. In N. J. Smelser & P. B.
Baltes (Eds.), International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (Vol. 26,
pp. 8817–8821). Oxford, England: Elsevier.
Fasang, A. E., & Raab, M. (2014). Beyond transmission: Intergenerational patterns of
family formation in middle-class American families. Demography, 51, 1703–1728.
Hagestad, G. O. (1985). Continuity and connectedness. In V. L. Bengtson & J. F.
Robertson (Eds.), Grandparenthood (pp. 31–48). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications.
Kendler, K. S. (2001). Twin studies of psychiatric illness: An update. Archives of General Psychiatry, 58(11), 1005–1014.
Knafo, A., & Spinath, F. M. (2011). Genetic and environmental influences on girls’
and boys’ gender-typed and gender-neutral values. Developmental Psychology, 47,
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Kohler, H.-P., Rodgers, J. L., & Christensen, K. (1999). Is fertility behavior in our
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Kolk, M. (2014). Multigenerational transmission of family size in contemporary Sweden. Population Studies, 68(1), 111–129.
Liefbroer, A. C., & Elzinga, C. H. (2012). Intergenerational transmission of behavioral patterns: How similar are parents’ and children’s demographic trajectories?
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Lyngstad, T. H., & Prskawetz, A. (2010). Do siblings’ fertility decisions influence each
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Mare, R. D., & Maralani, V. (2006). The intergenerational effects of changes in
women’s educational attainments. American Sociological Review, 71, 542–564.
Miller, W. B. (1992). Personality traits and developmental experiences as antecedents
of childbearing motivation. Demography, 29(2), 265–285.

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Moen, P., Erickson, M. A., & Dempster-McClain, D. (1997). Their mother’s daughters? The intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes in a world of changing
roles. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 5(1), 281–293.
Murphy, M. (1999). Is the relationship between fertility of parents and children really
weak? Social Biology, 46(1–2), 122–145.
Murphy, M. J., & Knudsen, L. B. (2002). The intergenerational transmission of fertility in contemporary Denmark: The effects of number of siblings (full and half),
birth order, and whether male or female. Population Studies, 56(3), 235–248. ISSN
0032-4728.
Murphy, M., & Wang, D. (2002). The impact of intergenerationally-transmitted fertility and nuptiality on population dynamics in contemporary populations. In J.
L. Rodgers & H.-P. Kohler (Eds.), Biodemography of human reproduction and fertility
(pp. 209–228). Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Pearson, K., Lee, A., & Bramley-Moore, L. (1899). Mathematical contributions to the
theory of evolution. VI. Genetic (reproductive) selection: Inheritance of fertility in
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Risch, S. C., Jodl, K. M., & Eccles, J. S. (2004). Role of the father adolescent relationship
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Rodgers, J. L., & Doughty, D. (2000). Genetic and environmental influences on fertility expectations and outcomes using NLSY kinship data. In J. L. Rodgers, D. C.
Rowe & W. B. Miller (Eds.), Genetic influences on human fertility and sexuality (pp.
85–106). Boston, MA: Kluwer.
Rodgers, J. L., Hughes, K., Kohler, H. P., Christensen, K., Doughty, D., Rowe, D. C.,
& Miller, W. B. (2001). Genetic influence helps explain variation in human fertility:
Evidence from recent behavioral and molecular genetic studies. Current Directions
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Schermer, J. A., Feather, N. T., Gu, Z., & Martin, N. G. (2008). Phenotypic, genetic,
and environmental properties of the portrait values questionnaire. Twin Research
& Human Genetics, 11(5), 531–537.
Silverstein, M., & Giarrusso, R. (2011). Aging individuals, families, and societies:
Micromeso-macro linkages in the life course. In R. A. Settersten Jr., & J. L. Angel
(Eds.), Handbook of sociology of aging (pp. 35–49). New York, NY: Springer.
Soiliou, S. D., & Roushdy, R. (2008). Intergenerational transmission of fertility preferences: A test of the cultural substitution assumption. Working papers 352, University
of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Tam, K.-P. (2015). Understanding intergenerational cultural transmission through
the role of perceived norms. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 46, 1260–1266.
Tambs, K., Sundet, J. M., Magnus, P., & Berg, K. (1989). Genetic and environmental
contributions to the covariance between occupational status, educational attainment, and IQ: A study of twins. Behavior Genetics, 19, 209–222.
Thomson, E. (2014). Family complexity in Europe. The Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Sciences, 654(1), 245–258.

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Thornton, A. (1991). Influence of the marital history of parents on the marital and
cohabitational experiences of children. American Journal of Sociology, 96(4), 868–894.
Tropf, F. C., Stulp, G., Barban, N., Visscher, P. M., Yang, J., Snieder, H., & Mills, M.
C. (2015). Human fertility, molecular genetics, and natural selection in modern
societies. PloS One, 10(6), e0126821.
Udry, J. R. (1996). Biosocial models of low-fertility societies. Population and Development Review, 22, 325–336.
van Bavel, J., & Kok, J. (2009). Social control and the intergenerational transmission
of the age at marriage, rural Holland 1850–1940. Population-E, 64(20), 343–360.
van der Valk, I. E., Spruijt, I., de Goede, M., Larsen, H., & Meeus, W. (2008). Family
traditionalism and family structure. Attitudes and intergenerational transmission
of parents and adolescents. European Psychologist, 13(2), 83–95.
van Poppel, F., Monden, C., & Mandemakers, K. (2008). Marriage timing over the
generations. Human Nature, 19(1), 7–22.
Warren, J. R., & Hauser, R. M. (1997). Social stratification across three generations: New evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. American Sociological
Review, 62, 561–572.
Westphal, K., Poortman, A. R., & von der Lippe, T. (2015). What about the Grandparents? Children’s postdivorce residence arrangements and contact with grandparents. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 77, 424–440.
Williams, L. A., & Williams, B. J. (1974). A re-examination of the heritability of fertility
in the British peerage. Biodemography and Social Biology, 21, 225–231.

FURTHER READING
Bandura, A. (1976). Social learning theory. Prentice-Hall, NJ: Englewood-Cliffs.

LAURA BERNARDI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Laura Bernardi completed her doctorate at the University La Sapienza of
Rome, after receiving a masters in demography at Louvain-la-Neuve. Her
doctoral thesis was on the influence of personal relations in reproductive
choices. She then spent a postdoctoral year at Brown University before being
recruited by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock,
where she was an assistant professor and the director of the research group
on the culture of reproduction.
Her research focuses on the relationships between fertility, sexuality, and
family dynamics in a perspective of social and anthropological demography.
She has extensive expertise in the analysis of life course by combining various methodological approaches (multilevel analyses and ethnography of life
events).

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The Intergenerational Transmission
of Fertility
LAURA BERNARDI

Abstract
The intergenerational transmission of fertility has direct consequences on population dynamics and is indirectly related to the reproduction of social inequality. Early
studies focused on the positive correlation of parents and children fertility outcomes
such as family size or childbearing timing. Explanations for the observed correlations have spanned from genetic and social status inheritance mechanisms to role
modeling and socialization processes based on social learning and social influence.
More recently, the focus has shifted from fertility outcomes to similarities and dissimilarities of family formation patterns across generations, framing fertility in the
context of interrelated life course trajectories. Recent cutting-edge research has also
expanded upon the existing literature by focusing on the role played by multigenerational relationships and by bidirectional influence processes in parents-children
fertility behaviors. Challenges for future research are provided by the need to disentangle the interplay between genes and culture in defining tastes and preferences for
given values and norms related to fertility and the increasing family complexity and
migration that interfere with socialization processes.

INTRODUCTION
Intergenerational transmissions from parents to children have been studied
in different domains such as educational attainment (Mare & Maralani,
2006), union formation (Thornton, 1991), divorce (Diekmann & Engelhardt,
1999), and fertility (Barber, 2000). Research on the intergenerational transmission of fertility consistently shows that fertility outcomes, such as family
size or the age at first birth of parents and children, are positively and
significantly correlated and such association does not appear to weaken
over time (Murphy, 1999). Similarly, evidence shows a persistent intergenerational correlation of fertility and family-related norms and values
(Axinn & Thornton, 1993; Bernardi, 2013). Theoretical explanations for
such associations are much debated in the literature. Fertility behavior and
preferences can be transferred from parents to children through heritable
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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dispositions and social positions or through socialization mechanisms.
Hot questions in the field, since its beginning, have been the relative
importance of genetic and social components of the transmission and the
conditions under which transmission is more effective. More recently,
attention has shifted on the object of the transmission itself (Should that
be a specific behavior or a series of life course choices leading to it?), the
salient pool of relevant kin (Do grandparents and parents’ siblings matter?),
the direction of the transmission (Does it only go downward from parents
to children or, in the case of fertility attitudes, values, and norms, can
it be bidirectional?), and the interplay of transmission mechanisms with
the larger social environment (Under which environmental conditions is
transmission more likely to be effective?). Advanced methods of statistical
analysis and the availability of large data sets of close kin and siblings
across several generations have been supporting these new research lines.
Understanding the mechanisms beyond continuities and discontinuities
in fertility across generations advances knowledge on the forces driving
social change. The intergenerational transmission of fertility represents
a special case of the many intergenerational transfers that occurs along
generational lines (Bengston, 2002): The fact that parents transfer genetic
and social makeup, as well as preferences, norms, and values, to children
has important implications on population dynamics and, consequently,
for social inequalities. This essay briefly summarizes the current state of
research limited to the sociological and demographic literature, highlighting
recent promising research avenues.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION
OF FERTILITY
The intergenerational correlation of fertility has been matter of study for
more than a century (Pearson, Lee, & Bramley-Moore, 1899). Research on
the intergenerational transmission of family and fertility behavior consistently shows that parental fertility histories are positively and significantly
correlated with those of their children and such association does not appear
to weaken over time (Murphy, 1999). In contraceptive populations, where
fertility behavior is deliberately and efficiently controlled, the level of
intergenerational transmission of fertility is even higher than in the past
and it is comparable, in magnitude, to the effect of educational level on
fertility (Murphy & Wang, 2002). It affects family size, but also the timing
of fertility (Barber, 2001). In addition to behavior, the literature on the
intergenerational transmission of fertility has explored the passing of
preferences, attitudes, norms, and values on what is an ideal life course,
family size, or childbearing timing that are correlated to the transmission

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility

3

of behavior. Substantial evidence exists that attitudes toward family-related
behaviors are perpetuated through generations. Parental attitudes toward
timing of marriage and parenthood, as well as divorce, influence their
children’s family outcomes (van Bavel & Kok, 2009; van Poppel, Monden, &
Mandemakers, 2008). The strength of the influence depends on the exposure
time and the parent’s and the child’s gender (De Valk & Liefbroer, 2007).
Children’s fertility preferences, in terms of timing of childbearing, are
influenced by parental preferences and the latter may be more consequential
for the fertility behavior of children than children’s own preferences, even
more so than actual parents’ fertility behavior (Barber, 2000). Other norms
and ideals that could be transmitted from generation to generation are satisfaction and dissatisfaction with children or the need to live in a stable union.
Recent studies on register data showing that intergenerational associations
span multiple generations (net of parental effects) seem to suggest that the
transmission of norms on childbearing and family life plays an important
role in intergenerational association in fertility within families (Kolk, 2014).
TRANSMISSION MECHANISMS
Commonly evoked explanations for the intergenerational transmission of
fertility are genetic and socioeconomic heritability, early socialization, and
social influence during the reproductive ages. While often presented as competing, such explanations are potentially complementary.
GENETIC HERITABILITY
Parents and children share genetic dispositions that are influential for fertility behavior (Murphy, 1999). Much early research on intergenerational fertility was investigating heritability understood as the physiological ability
to have children. Early results supporting a genetic heritability were later
questioned and the genetic heritability of fecundity was put into doubt (e.g.,
L. A. Williams & B. J. Williams, 1974). The more recent studies looking at
genetic heritability of fertility use modern twin and siblings’ studies (Bras,
van Bavel, & Mandemakers, 2013), as well as general population samples
(Rodgers & Doughty, 2000), to estimate the magnitude of genetic and environmental factors involved in the transmission. Such studies have shown a
significant heritable component in the desire for children and motivation for
parenthood in the form of psychological dispositions related to genes (Miller,
1992) primarily relating to the timing of fertility (Rodgers et al., 2001). One
important mediator for the expression of genetic dispositions is the larger
social environment and the extent to which it affects genetic and behavioral

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variance. Empirical evidence shows that the lower the level of social constraints on fertility in a society, the larger the genetic influence on behavior.
Danish twin studies spanning through several cohorts between the end of the
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, before and after the
fertility transition in Denmark, show that the intergenerational transmission
of fertility was greater when deliberate decision-making in fertility choices
was larger and life course alternatives were more heterogeneous (Kendler,
2001).
SOCIOECONOMIC HERITABILITY
Parents and children may also act in similar ways because they have been
exposed to similar environmental influences and opportunity structures. As
education and occupational class are often correlated across generations,
occupying a common social position may produce status inheritance and
result in similar sets of preferences and normative beliefs for parents
and children (Moen, Erickson, & Dempster-McClain, 1997). However, if
structural conditions change dramatically or if intergenerational social
mobility is high, then the effects of status inheritance are low, despite close
relationships between parents and children. Sibling studies exploring the
effects of the family of origin on fertility outcomes show that, net of status
inheritance and parental socioeconomic and family structure characteristics,
siblings have significantly similar family formation patterns and fertility
outcomes (Bernardi & White, 2010; Lyngstad & Prskawetz, 2010; Murphy &
Knudsen, 2002). These results indicate that specific mechanisms occurring
within families may be a part of the explanation for the correlation between
parents and their children’s fertility.
SOCIALIZATION PROCESSES
The most fashionable explanation of the similarities in the trajectories of parents and children is early socialization (Amato, 1996). In particular, early socialization is the channel through which parents may pass to their children their
preferences, attitudes, norms, and values on what is an ideal life course, family size, or childbearing timing. Parents occupy a key position in their children’s social networks. First, children’s first exposure to others is generally
exposure to their parents. Second, the direct experience that children have
of the consequence of a given fertility behavior is within their family of origin and its structure. Last, parents have the means to exert social influence
throughout their children’s lives, whether economic transfer or emotional
means that act through subjective obligations (Bernardi & Oppo, 2008). Social
control and support in early childhood and adolescence are active ways in

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility

5

which parents influence their children. Parental beliefs may be transmitted
through disciplinary practices and conditional parental support. Qualitative
research provides support for the notion that network members endowed
with sanctioning power (i.e., parents) express their expectations regarding a
number of family and fertility transitions so that parents’ influence also is a
factor when their children move out and live independently (Bernardi, 2003).
Role modeling is involved when parents’ roles are reproduced by the children through passive internalization, rather than when purposive transmission is involved (Campbell, 1969). Children may also simply imitate what
they observe their parents’ preferences and behaviors to be and view them
as role models (Bandura, 2006). The efficacy of socialization in generating the
transmission of family-related norms and attitudes depends on the quality
of the social ties between parents and children (Risch, Jodl, & Eccles, 2004),
on the family structure and family context (van der Valk, Spruijt, de Goede,
Larsen, & Meeus, 2008), and in the case of attitudes and norms toward partnership, in the life course of the young adult children (Bucx, Raaijmakers, &
Van Wel, 2010).
IMPLICATIONS OF THE INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF FERTILITY
If the strength of the intergenerational transmission of fertility increases over
time, there may be important implications for low-fertility societies. First,
if children from larger families are more likely to reproduce their parents’
model, in the long run genetic dispositions or family preferences for large
family sizes shall outnumber those for smaller family sizes or childlessness.
The consequence may be measurable, in terms of fertility levels (Udry, 1996),
thus making it possible that fertility decline reverses, regardless of whether
intergenerational fertility transmission is the result of social or genetic factors. The increase in intergenerational transmission of fertility in contemporary societies also has consequences in terms of composition, size, and
structure of the kinship networks and, in particular, the redistribution of
children across families. Child-rich and child-poor families will attribute different social roles to the kin members and will have different opportunities
for caring for the elderly in contexts in which the welfare state is withdrawing
and the population is aging. Research in this area is far from being exhausted
and, in recent years, new avenues have been explored.
INNOVATIVE RESEARCH
In the following, I highlight three cutting-edge research directions that widen
the field of intergenerational transmission of fertility along the lines of what

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

I like to call the multidimensional transmission, multigenerational transmission, and multidirectional transmission. For each of these directions I will
offer exemplary, rather than exhaustive, research cases.
MULTIDIMENSIONAL TRANSMISSION
While most research in the intergenerational transmission of fertility compares parents’ and their children’s fertility-specific outcomes such as family
size, age at birth, or interval between births, recent research integrates fertility
in a life course perspective and in a more general pattern of family transitions. In doing so, it explores systematic deviations from the average pattern
of behavior and contrasts family trajectories, rather than punctual outcomes.
The shift in perspective is justified by acknowledging that fertility is inscribed
in the life course made of several parallel trajectories and multiple events
(Elder, 2001). The starting point is the recognition that it is very unlikely that
parents focus on transmitting just a specific behavior to children, rather than
more generally on some guidelines for what they think constitutes a good
life. Instead of looking at correlations between fertility outcomes, the intergenerational links are examined by comparing children and parents’ family
formation by means of dyadic sequence analysis (Liefbroer & Elzinga, 2012).
Using data that refers to US parents’ generations (1923–1968) and children’s
generations (1968–1984), they confirm the occurrence of intergenerational
transmission of family life trajectories. On average, similarities between the
trajectories of parents and children depends, for 80%, on continuities in adulthood trajectories across generations (unrelated parents and children) rather
than within family transmission; however, related parents and children display larger similarities and 20% of the intergenerational transmission occurs
within families. The results indicate that the similarity in family trajectories
across generations is comparable to that within the children’s generation but
weaker than the similarity within the parents’ generation. Such patterns suggest that, even in times of rapid social change such as those lived through the
children’s cohorts in this study, the intergenerational transmission of demographic trajectories takes place.
Fasang and Raab (2014) take a step further in the multidimensional direction by using parent/children dyads as unit of analysis—as in the previous
study—but by applying it to multichannel sequence analysis to study intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in the life courses. The methodological choice allows for moving beyond the deviation from the average
pattern approach and describing multiple possible types of intergenerational
transmission. The innovative focus differs itself from a focus on similarity

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility

7

and puts it on regularities in parental influence on children’s family formation. Even in cases in which trajectories are not similar, if one can empirically show that parents’ family trajectories are systematically related to the
family behavior of their children, intergenerational influences are proved to
be at work. Within-family social mechanisms—operating on the individual,
dyadic, or societal level—may link a specific parental family behavior to a different family behavior among their children (Silverstein & Giarrusso, 2011).
Results from the US population of parents and children in the second half
of the twentieth century show three patterns of intergenerational transmission, classified according to the kind of transitions experienced by parents
and children and the timing of such transitions: moderately similar dyadic
patterns of transmission (same transitions but different timing), strongly similar ones (similar transitions and timing), and dyads of parents and children
with contrasting patterns (Fasang & Raab, 2014). When studying the determinants in sorting parent/children dyads into specific transmission patterns,
the major discriminant factors are within-family characteristics (the emotional bonds between parents and children and the child birth). Structural
changes in employment and education indicated by upward social mobility and gender equality result in delayed schedules to similar family formation patterns between parents and their children. The patterns show a
gender-specific bias in the likelihood of falling in the strong transmission
pattern: father–daughter dyads are more similar across successive US generations and fall into the strong transmission pattern, while mother–daughter
dyads only in the moderate one. Daughters’ lives more frequently follow
the rhythm of those of their fathers than those of their mothers. The authors
interpret this as a consequence of the rise in gender equality and the inroads
that women of the daughters’ generations have made into the labor market
(Fasang & Raab, 2014).
MULTIGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION
Most studies on the intergenerational transmission of fertility focused on
parents’ influence on their children’s fertility patterns. However, kin other
than parents, such as grandparents and parents’ siblings, may also influence
the observed correlation. That is the starting assumption of new studies
investigating the multigenerational transmission of fertility behavior.
Murphy and Wang (2002) had already found that, even after controlling
for family size in the middle generation, an association in fertility behavior
between grandparents and their grandchildren remains. Using Swedish
register data and focusing on young generations born between 1970 and
1982, Kolk (2014) investigates and finds independent effects of the fertility
of grandparents and of aunts and uncles on fertility. He excludes the

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

possibility that status inheritance would drive such effects as the association
of socioeconomic traits between grandchildren and their grandparents in
his data is almost entirely mediated by the middle generation.1 Such associations may work both through direct socialization between grandparents
and grandchildren, or through the acquisition of a preference or taste for
kinship and extended family networks that is acquired when the youngest
generation grows up.
Including three generations opens up new possibilities to better understand
how genetic makeup, socioeconomic traits, and family preferences are transmitted across generations and efforts to try to disentangle the underlying
mechanisms. The challenge for multigenerational studies, even more than
studies focusing solely on parents and children, is to account for the fact that
the fertility outcomes or family patterns span over long periods of time and
the interplay with the larger historical context (relative weight of the intergenerational transmission and of the environmental changes). The increase
in the expression of within-family transmission and a fading of environmental influences was found in previous research (Kohler, Rodgers, & Christensen, 1999). Such a finding was recently confirmed with Belgian historical data (Bras et al., 2013). Analyzing the differential fertility outcomes of
twin, siblings, and half-siblings, in order to have various degrees of genetic
relatedness and different socialization processes, the authors show that inheritabilities were more strongly expressed for cohorts living their reproductive
years after the onset of fertility decline, in the fertility behavior of women
who grew up in places that were characterized by a relatively liberal religious climate, urban context, low working conditions, or high social status
(Bras et al., 2013). All of the latter characteristics are symptomatic of contexts
where social control on reproduction is lower and, therefore, environmental
influences are lower as well.
MULTIDIRECTIONAL TRANSMISSION
The intergenerational transmission of fertility behavior assumes a clear
temporal sequence and causal direction that parents’ fertility patters are
the benchmark for their children’s fertility patterns. In the transmission
of fertility-related norms, the direction is less straightforward: Children’s
characteristics may affect parents’ normative beliefs because parents want
to adapt to their children’s behavior in order to accept it. The assumption in
intergenerational transmission is that parents wish to transmit a replica of
1. Research on the interdependency of class positions of grandparents and grandchildren is inconclusive. Some research shows that they are almost independent of each other, once parents’ social class has
been taken into account (Warren & Hauser, 1997); other than that, there is a net grandparents’ effect in
social mobility over three generations (Chan & Boliver, 2014).

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility

9

their own characteristics to their children. However, parents may be willing
to pass on values underlying norms, taking into account the different historical moments in which their children are living through their reproductive
years. Therefore, specific prescriptive and proscriptive fertility norms may
be flexible and adapted to different historical and geographical contexts.
Reciprocal influence between parents and children’s attitudes over time has
been observed in relation to norms about family traditionalism (van der
Valk et al., 2008), cohabitation (Axinn & Thornton, 1993), and childbearing
timing and family size (Bernardi, 2013). According to a perceived norms
perspective (Tam, 2015), parents may be purposively enforcing norms and
values that they think are best serving their children, regardless of what their
own norms or behavior may be or have been in the past. A critical reading
of the intergenerational transmission assumptions that parents transmit to
their children, the same norms and behavior that guided their own fertility,
is refreshing. Intergenerational transmission of fertility norms is possibly an
active construction in which parents, directed by their own goals (what they
perceive as their children’s future well-being), select and try to pass norms
that are coherent with their goals (Tam, 2015). Qualitative evidence shows
that this may be the case in contexts where the socioeconomic conditions of
women have dramatically changed in the space of one generation, such as
in the Italian region of Sardegna in the second half of the twentieth century:
Daughters report conversations with their mothers that explicitly tried
to turn them away from following their own mother’s family formation
choices (Bernardi & Oppo, 2008). This mechanism may explain part of the
contrasting patterns across generations observed by Fasang and Raab (2014).
RESEARCH AHEAD
The outlined multidimensional, multigenerational, and multidirectional
transmissions are inspiring directions for future research on the intergenerational transmission of fertility patterns. The following section outlines
two challenges to be met in this area of research in the next future, namely,
the interplay of environmental and genetic factors, the complexification
of socialization processes due to growing family diversity, and migration
movements that characterize most contemporary populations.
The first challenge comes from genetic studies and the recognition that
preferences for given norms, values, and tastes are partially dependent
on cognitive traits that are genetically passed from parents to children. A
genetic component may operate under the form of a cognitive preference
for large or small family size or other behavioral responses that relate to
childbearing. The relationship between genetic heritability and heritability
in socioeconomic traits and other aspects indirectly related to fertility, such

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as appearance, are already known (Tambs, Sundet, Magnus, & Berg, 1989).
There is growing evidence that there are genetic influences in values (Knafo
& Spinath, 2011; Schermer, Feather, Gu, & Martin, 2008). Genes influence
brain processes and translate into influence in the way in which individuals
think and pay attention to social and personal issues and, therefore, give
importance to given values (predisposed affinities between parents and children to be influenced by given norms). It is, therefore, plausible that genetic
heritability could explain various aspects of fertility heritability across
generations: health, a part of the heritability of fertility norms/preferences,
and a part of the heritability of socioeconomic norms related to fertility
decision-making. Some first evidence on genetic influences on fertility
analyzing first hand genome data points in this direction (Tropf et al., 2015).
Disentangling the ways in which these mechanisms are additive or interacting with socialization processes and with the social environment external to
the family is crucial to understanding the likelihood that intergenerational
transmission continue to increase or decline in the following decades.
The second challenge is represented by the changing nature of the
relationship between parents and children in times of increasing family
complexity (Carlson & Meyer, 2014). Family complexity is relevant because
of the proportion of divorce and separations among parents resulting in
repartnering and in family recomposition. Repartnering being increasingly
common in recent decades, it has changed the environmental conditions
for parent/child relationships. A number of step-parent/step-child relationships, with variable durations and kinds of contact, are created and
three—if not four—“parents” take over the responsibility of educating
the same child (Thomson, 2014). The childhood experiences of those with
step-parents and half-siblings are likely to be very different from other children. Most of our core research on intergenerational effects, especially work
focused on developed societies, is rooted in a paradigm of parent-to-child
or parent-to-adult offspring connections. With an increasing number of children experiencing multiple household transitions and living arrangements
and with step-parents taking a larger role in the education of children, the
vector of the transmission may change. Step-parenthood raises the question
of which parents count as socialization agents for which children and what
implications this has for that part of intergenerational transmission that is
channeled by role modeling, social influence, and social control. There is
suggestive evidence of flawed role modeling and socialization complexity
after family disruption. Buhr and Huinink (2015) find a decline in family
effects across cohorts, which may be attributed to the rectangularization of
fertility or to the fact that primary socialization processes and role modeling
became more complex. van der Valk et al. (2008) found that parental attitude
transmission is significantly lower in families after a divorce and explained

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility

11

it as the consequence of the failure of role modeling and of the growing
distance between parents and children.
The adoption of a multigenerational transmission perspective has to
account for the fact that divorces and separations of parents translate into
differential exposures to maternal and paternal kin. It is known that a share
of paternal grandparents lose contact with their grandchildren if the father
separates (Hagestad, 1985), even though exposure varies by the children’s
custody arrangements (Westphal, Poortman, & von der Lippe, 2015). What
are the consequences of shortened exposures to the biological father and his
kin during childhood for fertility transmission? Are they likely to produce
mother biases in the extent to which role models, fertility preferences, and
norms are passed on, from one generation to the other, whether through one
step or passing by more distant kin (grandparent and parents’ siblings)?
The third underexplored area of research is the interplay of migration
trajectories with intergenerational transmission of fertility. Research on
intergenerational transmission of family and fertility among migrants and
their children is rather limited (Brannen, 2015). Growing mobility and more
complex migration trajectories generally produce accelerated changes in the
social environment of those who are on the move. With the broadening of
social and cultural spaces of references, migration complicates generational
distance over time. Within populations where the share of parents who
are migrants increases, what are the consequence for intergenerational
transmission of values and norms of immigrants’ children? There is recent
and suggestive evidence that the transmission of norms about marriage
among migrants varies in comparison with nonmigrants, with an overall
intergenerational transmission stronger in native families and weaker in
migrant families (Baykara-Krumme, 2015). In the case of fertility, parents
may be more likely to invest actively in socializing their children if the
cultural traits they want to pass on are not prevalent (Soiliou & Roushdy,
2008) or they may want their children to adopt different behavior and
preferences in order to let them better and faster integrate in the majority.
Research on the intergenerational transmission of fertility will continue to
be an exciting field of research in the years to come, given the centrality of fertility for demographic dynamics and the reproduction of social inequalities.
Future researchers in the area will have to engage with the increasing complexity characterizing contemporary families, the new perspectives offered
by the examination of multigenerational data sets and multidimensional processes of transmission, and the insights coming from research in neighboring
disciplines such as social psychology, biology, and genetics to explain mechanisms at play in the correlation of fertility preferences and behaviors.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This publication is based on the research conducted at the Swiss National
Centre of Competence in Research LIVES—Overcoming vulnerability: Life
course perspectives, which is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. I wish to thank Elizabeth Thomson, Johannes Huinink, and the editors
of Emerging Trends for their critical reading of the early version of this essay
and their useful advice. All limitations remain the author’s full responsibility.

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Soiliou, S. D., & Roushdy, R. (2008). Intergenerational transmission of fertility preferences: A test of the cultural substitution assumption. Working papers 352, University
of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Tam, K.-P. (2015). Understanding intergenerational cultural transmission through
the role of perceived norms. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 46, 1260–1266.
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Thornton, A. (1991). Influence of the marital history of parents on the marital and
cohabitational experiences of children. American Journal of Sociology, 96(4), 868–894.
Tropf, F. C., Stulp, G., Barban, N., Visscher, P. M., Yang, J., Snieder, H., & Mills, M.
C. (2015). Human fertility, molecular genetics, and natural selection in modern
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of the age at marriage, rural Holland 1850–1940. Population-E, 64(20), 343–360.
van der Valk, I. E., Spruijt, I., de Goede, M., Larsen, H., & Meeus, W. (2008). Family
traditionalism and family structure. Attitudes and intergenerational transmission
of parents and adolescents. European Psychologist, 13(2), 83–95.
van Poppel, F., Monden, C., & Mandemakers, K. (2008). Marriage timing over the
generations. Human Nature, 19(1), 7–22.
Warren, J. R., & Hauser, R. M. (1997). Social stratification across three generations: New evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. American Sociological
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Westphal, K., Poortman, A. R., & von der Lippe, T. (2015). What about the Grandparents? Children’s postdivorce residence arrangements and contact with grandparents. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 77, 424–440.
Williams, L. A., & Williams, B. J. (1974). A re-examination of the heritability of fertility
in the British peerage. Biodemography and Social Biology, 21, 225–231.

FURTHER READING
Bandura, A. (1976). Social learning theory. Prentice-Hall, NJ: Englewood-Cliffs.

LAURA BERNARDI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Laura Bernardi completed her doctorate at the University La Sapienza of
Rome, after receiving a masters in demography at Louvain-la-Neuve. Her
doctoral thesis was on the influence of personal relations in reproductive
choices. She then spent a postdoctoral year at Brown University before being
recruited by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock,
where she was an assistant professor and the director of the research group
on the culture of reproduction.
Her research focuses on the relationships between fertility, sexuality, and
family dynamics in a perspective of social and anthropological demography.
She has extensive expertise in the analysis of life course by combining various methodological approaches (multilevel analyses and ethnography of life
events).

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The Intergenerational Transmission
of Fertility
LAURA BERNARDI

Abstract
The intergenerational transmission of fertility has direct consequences on population dynamics and is indirectly related to the reproduction of social inequality. Early
studies focused on the positive correlation of parents and children fertility outcomes
such as family size or childbearing timing. Explanations for the observed correlations have spanned from genetic and social status inheritance mechanisms to role
modeling and socialization processes based on social learning and social influence.
More recently, the focus has shifted from fertility outcomes to similarities and dissimilarities of family formation patterns across generations, framing fertility in the
context of interrelated life course trajectories. Recent cutting-edge research has also
expanded upon the existing literature by focusing on the role played by multigenerational relationships and by bidirectional influence processes in parents-children
fertility behaviors. Challenges for future research are provided by the need to disentangle the interplay between genes and culture in defining tastes and preferences for
given values and norms related to fertility and the increasing family complexity and
migration that interfere with socialization processes.

INTRODUCTION
Intergenerational transmissions from parents to children have been studied
in different domains such as educational attainment (Mare & Maralani,
2006), union formation (Thornton, 1991), divorce (Diekmann & Engelhardt,
1999), and fertility (Barber, 2000). Research on the intergenerational transmission of fertility consistently shows that fertility outcomes, such as family
size or the age at first birth of parents and children, are positively and
significantly correlated and such association does not appear to weaken
over time (Murphy, 1999). Similarly, evidence shows a persistent intergenerational correlation of fertility and family-related norms and values
(Axinn & Thornton, 1993; Bernardi, 2013). Theoretical explanations for
such associations are much debated in the literature. Fertility behavior and
preferences can be transferred from parents to children through heritable
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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dispositions and social positions or through socialization mechanisms.
Hot questions in the field, since its beginning, have been the relative
importance of genetic and social components of the transmission and the
conditions under which transmission is more effective. More recently,
attention has shifted on the object of the transmission itself (Should that
be a specific behavior or a series of life course choices leading to it?), the
salient pool of relevant kin (Do grandparents and parents’ siblings matter?),
the direction of the transmission (Does it only go downward from parents
to children or, in the case of fertility attitudes, values, and norms, can
it be bidirectional?), and the interplay of transmission mechanisms with
the larger social environment (Under which environmental conditions is
transmission more likely to be effective?). Advanced methods of statistical
analysis and the availability of large data sets of close kin and siblings
across several generations have been supporting these new research lines.
Understanding the mechanisms beyond continuities and discontinuities
in fertility across generations advances knowledge on the forces driving
social change. The intergenerational transmission of fertility represents
a special case of the many intergenerational transfers that occurs along
generational lines (Bengston, 2002): The fact that parents transfer genetic
and social makeup, as well as preferences, norms, and values, to children
has important implications on population dynamics and, consequently,
for social inequalities. This essay briefly summarizes the current state of
research limited to the sociological and demographic literature, highlighting
recent promising research avenues.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION
OF FERTILITY
The intergenerational correlation of fertility has been matter of study for
more than a century (Pearson, Lee, & Bramley-Moore, 1899). Research on
the intergenerational transmission of family and fertility behavior consistently shows that parental fertility histories are positively and significantly
correlated with those of their children and such association does not appear
to weaken over time (Murphy, 1999). In contraceptive populations, where
fertility behavior is deliberately and efficiently controlled, the level of
intergenerational transmission of fertility is even higher than in the past
and it is comparable, in magnitude, to the effect of educational level on
fertility (Murphy & Wang, 2002). It affects family size, but also the timing
of fertility (Barber, 2001). In addition to behavior, the literature on the
intergenerational transmission of fertility has explored the passing of
preferences, attitudes, norms, and values on what is an ideal life course,
family size, or childbearing timing that are correlated to the transmission

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility

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of behavior. Substantial evidence exists that attitudes toward family-related
behaviors are perpetuated through generations. Parental attitudes toward
timing of marriage and parenthood, as well as divorce, influence their
children’s family outcomes (van Bavel & Kok, 2009; van Poppel, Monden, &
Mandemakers, 2008). The strength of the influence depends on the exposure
time and the parent’s and the child’s gender (De Valk & Liefbroer, 2007).
Children’s fertility preferences, in terms of timing of childbearing, are
influenced by parental preferences and the latter may be more consequential
for the fertility behavior of children than children’s own preferences, even
more so than actual parents’ fertility behavior (Barber, 2000). Other norms
and ideals that could be transmitted from generation to generation are satisfaction and dissatisfaction with children or the need to live in a stable union.
Recent studies on register data showing that intergenerational associations
span multiple generations (net of parental effects) seem to suggest that the
transmission of norms on childbearing and family life plays an important
role in intergenerational association in fertility within families (Kolk, 2014).
TRANSMISSION MECHANISMS
Commonly evoked explanations for the intergenerational transmission of
fertility are genetic and socioeconomic heritability, early socialization, and
social influence during the reproductive ages. While often presented as competing, such explanations are potentially complementary.
GENETIC HERITABILITY
Parents and children share genetic dispositions that are influential for fertility behavior (Murphy, 1999). Much early research on intergenerational fertility was investigating heritability understood as the physiological ability
to have children. Early results supporting a genetic heritability were later
questioned and the genetic heritability of fecundity was put into doubt (e.g.,
L. A. Williams & B. J. Williams, 1974). The more recent studies looking at
genetic heritability of fertility use modern twin and siblings’ studies (Bras,
van Bavel, & Mandemakers, 2013), as well as general population samples
(Rodgers & Doughty, 2000), to estimate the magnitude of genetic and environmental factors involved in the transmission. Such studies have shown a
significant heritable component in the desire for children and motivation for
parenthood in the form of psychological dispositions related to genes (Miller,
1992) primarily relating to the timing of fertility (Rodgers et al., 2001). One
important mediator for the expression of genetic dispositions is the larger
social environment and the extent to which it affects genetic and behavioral

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variance. Empirical evidence shows that the lower the level of social constraints on fertility in a society, the larger the genetic influence on behavior.
Danish twin studies spanning through several cohorts between the end of the
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, before and after the
fertility transition in Denmark, show that the intergenerational transmission
of fertility was greater when deliberate decision-making in fertility choices
was larger and life course alternatives were more heterogeneous (Kendler,
2001).
SOCIOECONOMIC HERITABILITY
Parents and children may also act in similar ways because they have been
exposed to similar environmental influences and opportunity structures. As
education and occupational class are often correlated across generations,
occupying a common social position may produce status inheritance and
result in similar sets of preferences and normative beliefs for parents
and children (Moen, Erickson, & Dempster-McClain, 1997). However, if
structural conditions change dramatically or if intergenerational social
mobility is high, then the effects of status inheritance are low, despite close
relationships between parents and children. Sibling studies exploring the
effects of the family of origin on fertility outcomes show that, net of status
inheritance and parental socioeconomic and family structure characteristics,
siblings have significantly similar family formation patterns and fertility
outcomes (Bernardi & White, 2010; Lyngstad & Prskawetz, 2010; Murphy &
Knudsen, 2002). These results indicate that specific mechanisms occurring
within families may be a part of the explanation for the correlation between
parents and their children’s fertility.
SOCIALIZATION PROCESSES
The most fashionable explanation of the similarities in the trajectories of parents and children is early socialization (Amato, 1996). In particular, early socialization is the channel through which parents may pass to their children their
preferences, attitudes, norms, and values on what is an ideal life course, family size, or childbearing timing. Parents occupy a key position in their children’s social networks. First, children’s first exposure to others is generally
exposure to their parents. Second, the direct experience that children have
of the consequence of a given fertility behavior is within their family of origin and its structure. Last, parents have the means to exert social influence
throughout their children’s lives, whether economic transfer or emotional
means that act through subjective obligations (Bernardi & Oppo, 2008). Social
control and support in early childhood and adolescence are active ways in

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility

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which parents influence their children. Parental beliefs may be transmitted
through disciplinary practices and conditional parental support. Qualitative
research provides support for the notion that network members endowed
with sanctioning power (i.e., parents) express their expectations regarding a
number of family and fertility transitions so that parents’ influence also is a
factor when their children move out and live independently (Bernardi, 2003).
Role modeling is involved when parents’ roles are reproduced by the children through passive internalization, rather than when purposive transmission is involved (Campbell, 1969). Children may also simply imitate what
they observe their parents’ preferences and behaviors to be and view them
as role models (Bandura, 2006). The efficacy of socialization in generating the
transmission of family-related norms and attitudes depends on the quality
of the social ties between parents and children (Risch, Jodl, & Eccles, 2004),
on the family structure and family context (van der Valk, Spruijt, de Goede,
Larsen, & Meeus, 2008), and in the case of attitudes and norms toward partnership, in the life course of the young adult children (Bucx, Raaijmakers, &
Van Wel, 2010).
IMPLICATIONS OF THE INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF FERTILITY
If the strength of the intergenerational transmission of fertility increases over
time, there may be important implications for low-fertility societies. First,
if children from larger families are more likely to reproduce their parents’
model, in the long run genetic dispositions or family preferences for large
family sizes shall outnumber those for smaller family sizes or childlessness.
The consequence may be measurable, in terms of fertility levels (Udry, 1996),
thus making it possible that fertility decline reverses, regardless of whether
intergenerational fertility transmission is the result of social or genetic factors. The increase in intergenerational transmission of fertility in contemporary societies also has consequences in terms of composition, size, and
structure of the kinship networks and, in particular, the redistribution of
children across families. Child-rich and child-poor families will attribute different social roles to the kin members and will have different opportunities
for caring for the elderly in contexts in which the welfare state is withdrawing
and the population is aging. Research in this area is far from being exhausted
and, in recent years, new avenues have been explored.
INNOVATIVE RESEARCH
In the following, I highlight three cutting-edge research directions that widen
the field of intergenerational transmission of fertility along the lines of what

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I like to call the multidimensional transmission, multigenerational transmission, and multidirectional transmission. For each of these directions I will
offer exemplary, rather than exhaustive, research cases.
MULTIDIMENSIONAL TRANSMISSION
While most research in the intergenerational transmission of fertility compares parents’ and their children’s fertility-specific outcomes such as family
size, age at birth, or interval between births, recent research integrates fertility
in a life course perspective and in a more general pattern of family transitions. In doing so, it explores systematic deviations from the average pattern
of behavior and contrasts family trajectories, rather than punctual outcomes.
The shift in perspective is justified by acknowledging that fertility is inscribed
in the life course made of several parallel trajectories and multiple events
(Elder, 2001). The starting point is the recognition that it is very unlikely that
parents focus on transmitting just a specific behavior to children, rather than
more generally on some guidelines for what they think constitutes a good
life. Instead of looking at correlations between fertility outcomes, the intergenerational links are examined by comparing children and parents’ family
formation by means of dyadic sequence analysis (Liefbroer & Elzinga, 2012).
Using data that refers to US parents’ generations (1923–1968) and children’s
generations (1968–1984), they confirm the occurrence of intergenerational
transmission of family life trajectories. On average, similarities between the
trajectories of parents and children depends, for 80%, on continuities in adulthood trajectories across generations (unrelated parents and children) rather
than within family transmission; however, related parents and children display larger similarities and 20% of the intergenerational transmission occurs
within families. The results indicate that the similarity in family trajectories
across generations is comparable to that within the children’s generation but
weaker than the similarity within the parents’ generation. Such patterns suggest that, even in times of rapid social change such as those lived through the
children’s cohorts in this study, the intergenerational transmission of demographic trajectories takes place.
Fasang and Raab (2014) take a step further in the multidimensional direction by using parent/children dyads as unit of analysis—as in the previous
study—but by applying it to multichannel sequence analysis to study intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in the life courses. The methodological choice allows for moving beyond the deviation from the average
pattern approach and describing multiple possible types of intergenerational
transmission. The innovative focus differs itself from a focus on similarity

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility

7

and puts it on regularities in parental influence on children’s family formation. Even in cases in which trajectories are not similar, if one can empirically show that parents’ family trajectories are systematically related to the
family behavior of their children, intergenerational influences are proved to
be at work. Within-family social mechanisms—operating on the individual,
dyadic, or societal level—may link a specific parental family behavior to a different family behavior among their children (Silverstein & Giarrusso, 2011).
Results from the US population of parents and children in the second half
of the twentieth century show three patterns of intergenerational transmission, classified according to the kind of transitions experienced by parents
and children and the timing of such transitions: moderately similar dyadic
patterns of transmission (same transitions but different timing), strongly similar ones (similar transitions and timing), and dyads of parents and children
with contrasting patterns (Fasang & Raab, 2014). When studying the determinants in sorting parent/children dyads into specific transmission patterns,
the major discriminant factors are within-family characteristics (the emotional bonds between parents and children and the child birth). Structural
changes in employment and education indicated by upward social mobility and gender equality result in delayed schedules to similar family formation patterns between parents and their children. The patterns show a
gender-specific bias in the likelihood of falling in the strong transmission
pattern: father–daughter dyads are more similar across successive US generations and fall into the strong transmission pattern, while mother–daughter
dyads only in the moderate one. Daughters’ lives more frequently follow
the rhythm of those of their fathers than those of their mothers. The authors
interpret this as a consequence of the rise in gender equality and the inroads
that women of the daughters’ generations have made into the labor market
(Fasang & Raab, 2014).
MULTIGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION
Most studies on the intergenerational transmission of fertility focused on
parents’ influence on their children’s fertility patterns. However, kin other
than parents, such as grandparents and parents’ siblings, may also influence
the observed correlation. That is the starting assumption of new studies
investigating the multigenerational transmission of fertility behavior.
Murphy and Wang (2002) had already found that, even after controlling
for family size in the middle generation, an association in fertility behavior
between grandparents and their grandchildren remains. Using Swedish
register data and focusing on young generations born between 1970 and
1982, Kolk (2014) investigates and finds independent effects of the fertility
of grandparents and of aunts and uncles on fertility. He excludes the

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

possibility that status inheritance would drive such effects as the association
of socioeconomic traits between grandchildren and their grandparents in
his data is almost entirely mediated by the middle generation.1 Such associations may work both through direct socialization between grandparents
and grandchildren, or through the acquisition of a preference or taste for
kinship and extended family networks that is acquired when the youngest
generation grows up.
Including three generations opens up new possibilities to better understand
how genetic makeup, socioeconomic traits, and family preferences are transmitted across generations and efforts to try to disentangle the underlying
mechanisms. The challenge for multigenerational studies, even more than
studies focusing solely on parents and children, is to account for the fact that
the fertility outcomes or family patterns span over long periods of time and
the interplay with the larger historical context (relative weight of the intergenerational transmission and of the environmental changes). The increase
in the expression of within-family transmission and a fading of environmental influences was found in previous research (Kohler, Rodgers, & Christensen, 1999). Such a finding was recently confirmed with Belgian historical data (Bras et al., 2013). Analyzing the differential fertility outcomes of
twin, siblings, and half-siblings, in order to have various degrees of genetic
relatedness and different socialization processes, the authors show that inheritabilities were more strongly expressed for cohorts living their reproductive
years after the onset of fertility decline, in the fertility behavior of women
who grew up in places that were characterized by a relatively liberal religious climate, urban context, low working conditions, or high social status
(Bras et al., 2013). All of the latter characteristics are symptomatic of contexts
where social control on reproduction is lower and, therefore, environmental
influences are lower as well.
MULTIDIRECTIONAL TRANSMISSION
The intergenerational transmission of fertility behavior assumes a clear
temporal sequence and causal direction that parents’ fertility patters are
the benchmark for their children’s fertility patterns. In the transmission
of fertility-related norms, the direction is less straightforward: Children’s
characteristics may affect parents’ normative beliefs because parents want
to adapt to their children’s behavior in order to accept it. The assumption in
intergenerational transmission is that parents wish to transmit a replica of
1. Research on the interdependency of class positions of grandparents and grandchildren is inconclusive. Some research shows that they are almost independent of each other, once parents’ social class has
been taken into account (Warren & Hauser, 1997); other than that, there is a net grandparents’ effect in
social mobility over three generations (Chan & Boliver, 2014).

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility

9

their own characteristics to their children. However, parents may be willing
to pass on values underlying norms, taking into account the different historical moments in which their children are living through their reproductive
years. Therefore, specific prescriptive and proscriptive fertility norms may
be flexible and adapted to different historical and geographical contexts.
Reciprocal influence between parents and children’s attitudes over time has
been observed in relation to norms about family traditionalism (van der
Valk et al., 2008), cohabitation (Axinn & Thornton, 1993), and childbearing
timing and family size (Bernardi, 2013). According to a perceived norms
perspective (Tam, 2015), parents may be purposively enforcing norms and
values that they think are best serving their children, regardless of what their
own norms or behavior may be or have been in the past. A critical reading
of the intergenerational transmission assumptions that parents transmit to
their children, the same norms and behavior that guided their own fertility,
is refreshing. Intergenerational transmission of fertility norms is possibly an
active construction in which parents, directed by their own goals (what they
perceive as their children’s future well-being), select and try to pass norms
that are coherent with their goals (Tam, 2015). Qualitative evidence shows
that this may be the case in contexts where the socioeconomic conditions of
women have dramatically changed in the space of one generation, such as
in the Italian region of Sardegna in the second half of the twentieth century:
Daughters report conversations with their mothers that explicitly tried
to turn them away from following their own mother’s family formation
choices (Bernardi & Oppo, 2008). This mechanism may explain part of the
contrasting patterns across generations observed by Fasang and Raab (2014).
RESEARCH AHEAD
The outlined multidimensional, multigenerational, and multidirectional
transmissions are inspiring directions for future research on the intergenerational transmission of fertility patterns. The following section outlines
two challenges to be met in this area of research in the next future, namely,
the interplay of environmental and genetic factors, the complexification
of socialization processes due to growing family diversity, and migration
movements that characterize most contemporary populations.
The first challenge comes from genetic studies and the recognition that
preferences for given norms, values, and tastes are partially dependent
on cognitive traits that are genetically passed from parents to children. A
genetic component may operate under the form of a cognitive preference
for large or small family size or other behavioral responses that relate to
childbearing. The relationship between genetic heritability and heritability
in socioeconomic traits and other aspects indirectly related to fertility, such

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

as appearance, are already known (Tambs, Sundet, Magnus, & Berg, 1989).
There is growing evidence that there are genetic influences in values (Knafo
& Spinath, 2011; Schermer, Feather, Gu, & Martin, 2008). Genes influence
brain processes and translate into influence in the way in which individuals
think and pay attention to social and personal issues and, therefore, give
importance to given values (predisposed affinities between parents and children to be influenced by given norms). It is, therefore, plausible that genetic
heritability could explain various aspects of fertility heritability across
generations: health, a part of the heritability of fertility norms/preferences,
and a part of the heritability of socioeconomic norms related to fertility
decision-making. Some first evidence on genetic influences on fertility
analyzing first hand genome data points in this direction (Tropf et al., 2015).
Disentangling the ways in which these mechanisms are additive or interacting with socialization processes and with the social environment external to
the family is crucial to understanding the likelihood that intergenerational
transmission continue to increase or decline in the following decades.
The second challenge is represented by the changing nature of the
relationship between parents and children in times of increasing family
complexity (Carlson & Meyer, 2014). Family complexity is relevant because
of the proportion of divorce and separations among parents resulting in
repartnering and in family recomposition. Repartnering being increasingly
common in recent decades, it has changed the environmental conditions
for parent/child relationships. A number of step-parent/step-child relationships, with variable durations and kinds of contact, are created and
three—if not four—“parents” take over the responsibility of educating
the same child (Thomson, 2014). The childhood experiences of those with
step-parents and half-siblings are likely to be very different from other children. Most of our core research on intergenerational effects, especially work
focused on developed societies, is rooted in a paradigm of parent-to-child
or parent-to-adult offspring connections. With an increasing number of children experiencing multiple household transitions and living arrangements
and with step-parents taking a larger role in the education of children, the
vector of the transmission may change. Step-parenthood raises the question
of which parents count as socialization agents for which children and what
implications this has for that part of intergenerational transmission that is
channeled by role modeling, social influence, and social control. There is
suggestive evidence of flawed role modeling and socialization complexity
after family disruption. Buhr and Huinink (2015) find a decline in family
effects across cohorts, which may be attributed to the rectangularization of
fertility or to the fact that primary socialization processes and role modeling
became more complex. van der Valk et al. (2008) found that parental attitude
transmission is significantly lower in families after a divorce and explained

The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility

11

it as the consequence of the failure of role modeling and of the growing
distance between parents and children.
The adoption of a multigenerational transmission perspective has to
account for the fact that divorces and separations of parents translate into
differential exposures to maternal and paternal kin. It is known that a share
of paternal grandparents lose contact with their grandchildren if the father
separates (Hagestad, 1985), even though exposure varies by the children’s
custody arrangements (Westphal, Poortman, & von der Lippe, 2015). What
are the consequences of shortened exposures to the biological father and his
kin during childhood for fertility transmission? Are they likely to produce
mother biases in the extent to which role models, fertility preferences, and
norms are passed on, from one generation to the other, whether through one
step or passing by more distant kin (grandparent and parents’ siblings)?
The third underexplored area of research is the interplay of migration
trajectories with intergenerational transmission of fertility. Research on
intergenerational transmission of family and fertility among migrants and
their children is rather limited (Brannen, 2015). Growing mobility and more
complex migration trajectories generally produce accelerated changes in the
social environment of those who are on the move. With the broadening of
social and cultural spaces of references, migration complicates generational
distance over time. Within populations where the share of parents who
are migrants increases, what are the consequence for intergenerational
transmission of values and norms of immigrants’ children? There is recent
and suggestive evidence that the transmission of norms about marriage
among migrants varies in comparison with nonmigrants, with an overall
intergenerational transmission stronger in native families and weaker in
migrant families (Baykara-Krumme, 2015). In the case of fertility, parents
may be more likely to invest actively in socializing their children if the
cultural traits they want to pass on are not prevalent (Soiliou & Roushdy,
2008) or they may want their children to adopt different behavior and
preferences in order to let them better and faster integrate in the majority.
Research on the intergenerational transmission of fertility will continue to
be an exciting field of research in the years to come, given the centrality of fertility for demographic dynamics and the reproduction of social inequalities.
Future researchers in the area will have to engage with the increasing complexity characterizing contemporary families, the new perspectives offered
by the examination of multigenerational data sets and multidimensional processes of transmission, and the insights coming from research in neighboring
disciplines such as social psychology, biology, and genetics to explain mechanisms at play in the correlation of fertility preferences and behaviors.

12

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This publication is based on the research conducted at the Swiss National
Centre of Competence in Research LIVES—Overcoming vulnerability: Life
course perspectives, which is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. I wish to thank Elizabeth Thomson, Johannes Huinink, and the editors
of Emerging Trends for their critical reading of the early version of this essay
and their useful advice. All limitations remain the author’s full responsibility.

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FURTHER READING
Bandura, A. (1976). Social learning theory. Prentice-Hall, NJ: Englewood-Cliffs.

LAURA BERNARDI SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Laura Bernardi completed her doctorate at the University La Sapienza of
Rome, after receiving a masters in demography at Louvain-la-Neuve. Her
doctoral thesis was on the influence of personal relations in reproductive
choices. She then spent a postdoctoral year at Brown University before being
recruited by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock,
where she was an assistant professor and the director of the research group
on the culture of reproduction.
Her research focuses on the relationships between fertility, sexuality, and
family dynamics in a perspective of social and anthropological demography.
She has extensive expertise in the analysis of life course by combining various methodological approaches (multilevel analyses and ethnography of life
events).

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