How societal pessimism shapes fertility expectations among Dutch non-parents

A bleak view of society’s future may be tied to uncertainty about becoming a parent, according to a longitudinal study of Dutch adults who did not have children when they entered a national research panel. The analysis found that people’s expectations about having children followed several distinct paths over time, and that women who remained unsure about parenthood reported significantly more pessimism about the conditions future generations would inherit than women who consistently expected to become mothers. The findings suggest that decisions about family formation may be shaped not only by housing costs, employment, partnerships or personal finances, but also by a broader “shadow of the future”—a person’s sense of whether society is moving toward a better or worse world.

The study, led by sociologist Katya Ivanova of Tilburg University, examined prospective data from the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences, or LISS, a probability-based panel designed to follow households over time. The researchers focused on women aged 18 to 45 and men aged 18 to 50 who were not parents when their views about the future were recorded. The final sample included 2,359 people, 53.4 percent of them women. Participants contributed an average of 3.12 fertility-expectation reports over approximately 4.11 years, although some were observed for longer and others left the panel earlier. Across the observation window, 260 participants became parents.

Rather than treating fertility expectations as a single snapshot, the researchers repeatedly examined responses to a deceptively simple question: “Do you think that you will have [more] children in the future?” Participants could answer yes, no or “I don’t know.” At their first observation, 62.2 percent said they expected to have children, 12.1 percent said they did not, and 25.7 percent were uncertain. These answers were not interpreted as fixed intentions. An expectation describes the future a person considers most likely, whereas an intention is generally closer to a commitment to act. Someone may therefore expect to become a parent without having a concrete plan, or remain uncertain while circumstances such as relationships, education, employment and housing continue to change.

To identify recurring patterns, Ivanova used joint latent class analysis, a statistical method designed to uncover unobserved subgroups within longitudinal data. The approach modeled fertility expectations across age while simultaneously accounting for the timing of a participant’s transition to parenthood. This joint modeling was important because expectations recorded after someone had a first child were not simply ordinary missing values: parenthood changed the question’s meaning and could make later responses unavailable. The analysis estimated age-related patterns using cubic B-splines, which represent potentially nonlinear changes through connected polynomial curves. Models with different numbers of latent classes were compared using the Bayesian Information Criterion, while the researcher also assessed whether the classes were large, statistically coherent and substantively interpretable.

Among women, the best-fitting model contained three trajectories. The largest, representing 62.7 percent of the female sample, was labeled “committed to parenthood.” These women generally expected to have children from the beginning of observation. Their expectations became more uncertain in the late 30s and shifted increasingly toward no expectation of having children after about age 40, a pattern consistent with the narrowing biological and social window for childbearing. Nevertheless, 89 percent of women in this group became mothers, typically at a median age of 32. Their apparent shift away from certainty later in life therefore often reflected the changing likelihood of fulfilling an expectation rather than a wholesale reversal of an earlier desire.

A second group, comprising 24 percent of the women, displayed persistent uncertainty. Doubt remained prominent across the observation period and increasingly shifted toward no expectation from the late 30s onward. About 30 percent of these women nevertheless became parents, at a median age of approximately 36. The third group, 13.3 percent of the sample, moved earlier and more steadily from uncertainty toward no expectation of having children. Only 24 percent became parents, and those who did generally did so much later, at a median age of about 42. The contrast between these groups is central to the study: uncertainty was not merely a temporary pause between wanting children and deciding against them. For roughly one in four women, it appeared as a durable trajectory that often ended without parenthood.

Men showed a similar broad structure but with one additional pattern. The largest male class, 46.3 percent of the sample, was also “committed to parenthood.” These men initially expected to have children, became more uncertain between their 30s and 40s, and increasingly reported no expectation from around age 36 onward. Eighty-one percent became fathers, at a median age of 32. A second group, representing 22.4 percent, began with considerable uncertainty through the mid-20s before developing a clear expectation of parenthood that persisted into the early 40s. Eighty-six percent became fathers, but at a later median age of about 37, leading the researcher to call them “later arrivals to expectation of parenthood.”

The remaining men were divided between a persistently uncertain group, about 22 percent of the sample, and an “early commitment to no expectation” group, 9.4 percent. The uncertain men tended to move toward no expectation by the end of observation, although 37 percent still became fathers, usually around age 42. In the final group, expectations of having children declined sharply at relatively young ages; only 28 percent became parents, with those who did doing so at a median age of about 24. Taken together, the results show that delayed parenthood and childlessness emerge through different pathways. Some people expect children early and eventually have them, some become parents only after years of hesitation, and others maintain uncertainty or move toward a child-free future relatively early.

The study’s most striking result emerged when these trajectories were compared with “societal pessimism,” a measure of how participants believed living conditions for the coming generation would compare with those of the present. The scale combined 15 questions covering social relationships, economic prospects, social mobility and inequality, employment and personal well-being. Responses ranged from one, meaning the future would be significantly better, to seven, meaning it would be significantly worse; the answers were reverse-coded so that higher scores indicated greater pessimism. The scale showed high internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha between 0.87 and 0.92 across the relevant survey years, and the sample’s average score was 4.02.

For women, the relationship survived adjustments for age, depressive feelings, satisfaction with personal finances, education and partnership status at entry into the panel. Women in the committed-to-parenthood class had the lowest adjusted pessimism score, 3.96, while those in the uncertain class had the highest, 4.21. The early-no-expectation group scored 4.18, statistically distinguishable from the committed-to-parenthood group only in the reported pairwise comparisons. The pattern implies that social pessimism may be especially connected with hesitation rather than with a firm decision to remain child-free. People who clearly do not expect to have children may be acting from stable preferences, while those who remain ambivalent may be more responsive to anxieties about the world their potential children would enter.

Among men, differences were initially visible but disappeared after the full set of control variables was introduced. Before adjustment, men who had committed early to no expectation of parenthood reported the most pessimism, with a mean of 4.25, while later arrivals to parenthood had the lowest, at 3.82. The committed-to-parenthood group averaged 3.90 and the uncertain group 4.01. Once depression, financial satisfaction, education and partnership status were considered, however, the class differences were no longer statistically significant. This gender contrast does not prove that societal pessimism affects women’s fertility expectations but suggests that the association may be shaped by gendered expectations surrounding parenthood. In the Netherlands, where voluntary childlessness has become increasingly socially acceptable, women may still face stronger cultural pressure to regard motherhood as a central adult identity, making collective concerns about the future more consequential in their reproductive thinking.

Ivanova emphasizes that the findings are descriptive and exploratory rather than evidence of a direct causal pathway. The data cannot establish that pessimism causes uncertainty, or that uncertainty causes people to forgo parenthood. The analysis measured societal pessimism once, when participants entered the LISS panel, and did not track changes in employment, relationships, housing or other circumstances as fertility expectations evolved. Such factors could influence both how people view the future and whether they anticipate having children. The trajectories also represent partial reproductive histories rather than complete life courses, and the Dutch setting may not resemble societies where parenthood remains a stronger social norm. Even so, the results challenge the idea that childlessness can be understood only through personal preference or immediate economic conditions. They show that uncertainty itself can be a stable demographic pathway—and that, at least among Dutch women, doubts about the future of society may be woven into that path.