Shelley Clark

Leech: There’s a growing narrative that declining fertility reflects people “opting out” of parenthood. What does the data actually tell us about whether people don’t want children — versus when they feel able to have them? Clark: What the evidence suggests is that this is much more about when than whether. Over the past 30 years in Canada, the proportion of women who reach the end of their reproductive years without having children has increased only slightly — from about 14% to 17%. That’s not a dramatic change. What has changed significantly is timing. People are waiting longer to have children, and many are having fewer. We won’t fully know whether today’s delays translate into permanent childlessness until younger generations reach later life, but right now the data points much more strongly to postponement rather than rejection.

One thing I'd particularly want to highlight, since so many discussions of the future of family life get it wrong. People are very quick to look at *delayed* childbearing, as parents wait until later in adulthood, and think they're seeing a *refusal* of childbearing.

In her work as a sociologist and demographer, Shelley Clark examines how family life, gender, and life-course transitions are shaped by broader social and economic conditions. Over the past two decades, her research has explored how people navigate key transitions to adulthood across very different contexts — from adolescence and parenthood in sub-Saharan Africa to more recent work on rural–urban inequality, family dynamics, and reproductive health in Canada and the United States. In this conversation, Clark unpacks what’s changing in how Canadians are navigating adulthood and parenthood, what isn’t, and why family change today is better understood as evolution rather than rupture.

I spoke with Charles Leech for @ipsoscanada.bsky.social Ipsos Canada's "What the Future: Family" report. See pp. 36-39 at www.ipsos.com/sites/defaul...

Leech: There’s a growing narrative that declining fertility reflects people “opting out” of parenthood. What does the data actually tell us about whether people don’t want children — versus when they feel able to have them? Clark: What the evidence suggests is that this is much more about when than whether. Over the past 30 years in Canada, the proportion of women who reach the end of their reproductive years without having children has increased only slightly — from about 14% to 17%. That’s not a dramatic change. What has changed significantly is timing. People are waiting longer to have children, and many are having fewer. We won’t fully know whether today’s delays translate into permanent childlessness until younger generations reach later life, but right now the data points much more strongly to postponement rather than rejection.

One thing I'd particularly want to highlight, since so many discussions of the future of family life get it wrong. People are very quick to look at *delayed* childbearing, as parents wait until later in adulthood, and think they're seeing a *refusal* of childbearing.

In her work as a sociologist and demographer, Shelley Clark examines how family life, gender, and life-course transitions are shaped by broader social and economic conditions. Over the past two decades, her research has explored how people navigate key transitions to adulthood across very different contexts — from adolescence and parenthood in sub-Saharan Africa to more recent work on rural–urban inequality, family dynamics, and reproductive health in Canada and the United States. In this conversation, Clark unpacks what’s changing in how Canadians are navigating adulthood and parenthood, what isn’t, and why family change today is better understood as evolution rather than rupture.

I spoke with Charles Leech for @ipsoscanada.bsky.social Ipsos Canada's "What the Future: Family" report. See pp. 36-39 at www.ipsos.com/sites/defaul...

Human fertility in relation to education, economy, religion, contraception, and family planning programs - BMC Public Health Background The world population is expected to increase greatly this century, aggravating current problems related to climate, health, food security, biodiversity, energy and other vital resources. Po...

Figure found here:
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Worth noting that when people cite that religiosity is associated with greater fertility across nations (with the implication being we should increase religiosity HERE to increase our fertility rates), that link apparently only applies in non-Christian regions. In fact, W. Europe it's the opposite.

Fewer Quebec women having children, and later in life A new report from Quebec’s statistics institute shows women across the province are having fewer children and delaying motherhood, with Montreal recording the lowest fertility rate at 1.11 children pe...

I discussed changes in Quebec fertility, and variation in fertility across the province, with CityTV.

@mcgillumedia.bsky.social @mcgillarts.bsky.social

montreal.citynews.ca/2025/12/27/q...

Read the whole thing; strongly recommended!

5/5

As they sum it up: "Today, rural children are less likely than urban children to live with married parents and are more likely to live with cohabiting unmarried parents or in the care of grandparents or other relatives. Partly as a result, rural child poverty rates are higher than urban rates." 4/

Are Rural Areas Holdouts in the Second Demographic Transition? Evidence From Canada and the United States Abstract. A central premise of the first demographic transition theory is that demographic change would occur more slowly in rural than urban areas. Few studies, however, have investigated whether rur...

And with Matthew, Ann-Marie Helou, and @rsmargo.bsky.social Rachel Margolis here:

3/

doi.org/10.1215/0070...

The response to "Myth 5: Rural families are more traditional than urban families" draws on work that I've done with @ruraldemography.bsky.social Matthew Brooks here: "The Rise of Nontraditional Rural Families Reflects
Rural Women’s Socioeconomic Disadvantage"

2/

rprn.org/wp-content/u...

6 myths about rural America: How conventional wisdom gets it wrong Many people understand rural America through stereotypes. Two scholars who study rural communities bust 6 of those myths, complicating the conventional wisdom.

New in The Conversation from Tim Slack and @smonnat.bsky.social Shannon Monnat: "6 myths about rural America: How conventional wisdom gets it wrong"
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theconversation.com/6-myths-abou...

That trade-off reduces the other social and economic contributions women are making right now, just so they can produce future workers.”

3/3

“And even progressive pronatalism risks ratifying the notion that women’s most important contribution to solving major social problems is to birth and raise children. More children inevitably (so far) means fewer women in the workforce....

2/

What If Both Sides in the Birth Rate Debate Are Wrong? The right wants to steer women away from work and toward motherhood. The left wants to provide them with more state support so it’s easier to have children. We should refuse this choice.

newrepublic.com/article/2040...

New by UMd demographer @philipncohen.com in TNR, on the pronatalist panic. Some key lines:

"giving in to population panic and endorsing a plan to increase birth rates implicitly supports anti-immigration politics and yields ground to racist fearmongering.”

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Abstract High levels of premarital childbearing in Africa have spurred considerable interest in its consequences for women. Premarital childbearing corresponds with women's poor health, as well as their subsequent life course outcomes, including their marriage timing and quality. However, this work has not considered the survival of women's premaritally born children, leaving unclear what happens to unmarried mothers when their children do not survive. In this paper, we ask how infant death affects unmarried mothers' subsequent life course outcomes. We analyze recent Demographic and Health Survey data from 26 countries to examine the marital outcomes of unmarried mothers-differentiating between those whose firstborn survived infancy and those whose child did not. We find that, although premarital childbearing is generally known to correspond with marriage disadvantages, unwed mothers whose premarital births ended in the death of an infant have distinctive marital trajectories and experiences compared to their peers with a surviving child. Although child loss accelerates unmarried mothers' entry into marriages, these bereaved mothers are more likely to marry less educated, polygynous, and violent husbands, especially among younger birth cohorts. The results demonstrate the double disadvantages unmarried women face in both bearing and losing a child.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41277108/

Now available:

"From Birth to Death: The Marital Consequences of Child Loss for Unmarried Mothers"

Stud Fam Plann 2025 Nov 23. doi:10.1111/sifp.70041. Online ahead of print.

Thread!

<em>Journal of Marriage and Family</em> | NCFR Family Science Journal | Wiley Online Library Objective To examine whether family change in rural America is widening the rural–urban child poverty gap and increasing inequalities between children raised in married parent families and those rai...

Want to know why these encouraging but expected trends occurred? Well you can read the full paper here to find out: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Answer #2: When using the Supplemental Poverty Rate, we find that rural child poverty rates have fallen, particularly post 2017. Broadly speaking, this progress on poverty is unexpected since rural kids are increasingly living in nonmarital families, which normally have high risks of poverty.

Answer #1: Rural kids are increasingly NOT living in married parent families. Instead they are increasingly living with cohabiting parents, never married parents, and with no parents (kinship care). This shift away from married families has happened at much faster pace for rural than urban kids.

Ever wonder about what’s it like to grow up in rural America? So did we! @shelleydclark.bsky.social and I tackle two basic—but essential—questions in our new Journal of Marriage and Family article, just out today. Who do rural kids live with today? How likely are rural kids to grow up in poverty?

Looking forward to this!

psu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/t/1_np...

"The current pro-natalist project is weaponizing an imaginary rural America in ways that harm real rural Americans today."

My DeJong Lecture, and the others in the 20th anniversary event, is now available: "How pro-natalist policies harm rural Americans."

@mcgillarts.bsky.social @mcgillumedia.bsky.social @mcgillnewsmag.bsky.social @popassocamerica.bsky.social

psu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/t/1_np...

"The current pro-natalist project is weaponizing an imaginary rural America in ways that harm real rural Americans today."

My DeJong Lecture, and the others in the 20th anniversary event, is now available: "How pro-natalist policies harm rural Americans."

Starting now; join us on Zoom.

pop.psu.edu/events/20th-...

ICYMI

Repeated headlines about population collapse got you worried? @amandajean.bsky.social and a team of demographer colleagues (including me) on why you should rest easy in the face of the pronatalist panic.

We are building a new pop center at UofT and will hold our first mini-conference on Nov 6 - come join us!!

Exhibit 1: amazing speaker line-up - featuring friends around the world to discuss why demography/pop center matters! 🤓

Exhibit 2: the iconic castle where this conference will take place 🏰 ✨

Tomorrow at 9 am EST I'll be one of the three speakers for the 20th anniversary of the De Jong Lecture at Penn State, discussing “The Underpinnings and Limits of Pronatalism.” Registration to watch on Zoom is available at the link.

pop.psu.edu/events/20th-...