Remaining childless: examining the different patterns of expectations that lead to a childless life for men

Early life fertility expectations fail to explain why a substantial proportion of men remain childless. To understand which roads lead to childlessness, it is important to investigate the patterning of fertility expectations across men’s life courses. Therefore, the current study focuses on pathways into childlessness for men, by differentiating groups based on whether, and if so when, changes in fertility expectations occurred. In addition, we examine how these patterns of fertility expectations were linked to men’s labour force participation (LFP) and marital relationships. We use data from the American National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and applied sequence, clustering, and multinomial logistic regression methods to analyze stability and change in childless men’s life course between the ages of 22 and 47 (N = 679). Based on their patterns of fertility expectations, we identified four groups of childless men. (1) Early switchers (29%), (2) mid-thirty switchers (29%), (3) late or never switchers (25%), and men with unstable expectations (18%). Early switchers often got married early, while late or never switchers were more likely those who got married at a later age. In contrast, interrupted LFP was only weakly related to patterns of fertility expectations. Our longitudinal focus revealed, firstly, that different roads of fertility expectations lead to childlessness for men. Second, changes in men’s partnership status often precede changes in their fertility expectations. This study is the first to use a prospective design to investigate childless men’s complete reproductive history, revealing that different trajectories of fertility expectations lead to childlessness. © The Author(s) 2023. corrected publication 2023.