The backdrop to the research is one of the defining demographic shifts of our era: the systematic postponement of parenthood. Infertility is medically defined as the failure to conceive or maintain a pregnancy after twelve months or more of regular unprotected intercourse, and its global lifetime prevalence is estimated at 17.5 percent, according to a 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis. Because the biological capacity to reproduce declines with age—steeply for women and, to a lesser extent, for men—every year of delay raises the share of couples who eventually confront fertility problems. In Australia, where the study was set, an estimated 16 percent of heterosexual couples report difficulties conceiving. The timing of first births has transformed accordingly: in 1991, roughly a quarter of Australian women had their first child at age 30 or older; by 2020, more than half did. Meanwhile the two-child ideal has barely budged over two decades, even as completed family size has slid steadily downward—a widening gap between intended and achieved fertility that postponed and thwarted conception helps to explain.

Demographers have long known that fertility preferences are not fixed traits. Economic insecurity, career changes, new partnerships, separations and health shocks have all been shown to nudge childbearing desires and expectations up or down. Yet the uncertainty generated by infertility itself—a condition that is at once chronic, often persisting for months or years, and unplanned, arriving without warning—has remained largely uncharted territory. Earlier cross-sectional studies offered tantalising clues: among American women, those who identified as infertile reported lower fertility intentions but higher desires and a larger ideal family size, and infertile women attending gynaecology clinics in China expressed bigger ideal families alongside shakier confidence in achieving them. Because such single-moment snapshots cannot establish which came first, the altered preferences or the infertility, the causal story stayed murky. The new study is among the first to follow men as well as women through the transition into infertility and watch, statistically, what happens to their plans.

To do so, Lazzari turned to the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, a nationally representative panel launched in 2001 with more than 13,000 participants and wave-on-wave response rates above 90 percent. The analysis hinges on two waves separated by four years: 2015, designated Time 1, and 2019, designated Time 2. Respondents aged 18 to 45 for women and 18 to 50 for men answered two questions on 11-point scales: “How do you feel about having a child (more children) in the future?”, capturing desire, and “How likely are you to have a child (more children) in the future?”, capturing expectation, with the expectation scale running from very likely at zero to very unlikely at ten. Crucially, HILDA poses these questions to everyone of reproductive age, not merely to those who conceive easily—an inclusive design that sidesteps the routine exclusion of infertile respondents from fertility research, under the mistaken assumption that they lack fertility preferences. Infertility status was derived from a single question: “Based on medical advice, do you know of any physical or health reason that would make it difficult for you (and/or your partner) to have children?”

The methodological architecture is deliberately conservative. The cross-sectional sample numbered 6,520 respondents after the exclusion of cases with missing values, while the longitudinal core comprised 3,702 people who were fertile at baseline and traced to follow-up four years later; those already reporting infertility in 2015 were removed so that the analysis isolates the transition into the condition. Between the waves, 11.3 percent of women and 5.5 percent of men made that transition. Because infertility is not randomly assigned—people with strong fertility desires are more likely to forgo contraception and attempt conception, and therefore more likely to encounter infertility—Lazzari employed the regressor variable method, an ordinary least squares technique that predicts preferences at Time 2 while statistically holding constant each person’s baseline preference at Time 1. The models further adjusted for events unfolding between waves, including the birth of a child, changes in relationship status and shifts in financial satisfaction, together with age, education, parity, migration and Indigenous status, and area of residence. A supplementary analysis of 777 heterosexual co-resident couples incorporated partners’ own preferences, ages and education, since childbearing decisions are typically negotiated between two people rather than made by one.

The snapshot results echoed earlier work with new precision. Among infertile men, 42 percent registered a desire score of zero and 45 percent an expectation score of zero, compared with 27 and 25 percent of their fertile counterparts; just under 40 percent of infertile women expressed the lowest possible expectation of having a child, against 23 percent of fertile women. Yet once age, parity, partnership status, education and finances were taken into account, a paradox surfaced: infertility was actually associated with higher fertility desires among women, and with lower expectations among both sexes. The expectation gap was no artefact of infertile respondents simply being older or more often parents—it persisted, statistically significant, after all observable differences were accounted for, in line with the study’s cross-sectional hypotheses.

The longitudinal analysis delivered the headline finding. Net of all controls, transitioning into infertility between 2015 and 2019 predicted a significant downward revision of fertility expectations for both men and women, confirming the hypothesis that expectations bend under the weight of the condition. Desires, by contrast, did not move significantly in either direction. Simple descriptive comparisons told the same story: by 2019, both groups had tempered their outlooks, but the downward adjustment in expectations was markedly larger among those who had experienced infertility, and for women the difference between infertile and never-infertile respondents was statistically significant in formal tests. A companion model restricted to co-resident couples, which additionally modelled each partner’s own wishes and relationship satisfaction, reproduced the pattern almost exactly: infertility reshaped expectations within couples, but left desires standing.

Two of the study’s predictions failed in illuminating ways. Lazzari had hypothesised that people of lower socioeconomic status, facing greater barriers to assisted reproductive technology, would revise their expectations downward more sharply, and that women, who the literature says bear the greater emotional toll, would show stronger effects than men. Neither held: education and financial satisfaction left the infertility–expectation link essentially unchanged, and interaction models revealed no gender-specific effects. The author points to Australia’s policy environment as a partial explanation: the national insurer Medicare subsidises assisted reproduction without restrictions on age, parity or the number of subsidised treatments, and general practitioners serve as gatekeepers to fertility clinics—circumstances that may blunt socioeconomic gradients, even though disparities in access persist and women remain about three times more likely than men to consult a doctor about fertility concerns. An alternative reading is that men who are aware of their infertility already constitute a self-selected, highly engaged group, compressing observable gender differences.

The dissociation between expectations and desires slots neatly into modern theories of fertility decision-making. In the traits–desires–intentions framework, desires represent an idealised vision of childbearing, relatively insulated from situational constraints, whereas intentions and expectations rationally incorporate perceived barriers and perceived behavioural control, as the Theory of Planned Behaviour also maintains. Cognitive models and the Theory of Conjunctural Action add that decisions are shaped as much by emotional associations and mental schemas as by explicit calculation. The Narrative Framework goes furthest: heightened uncertainty may darken expectations without extinguishing the imagined future self as a parent. Infertility is uniquely ambiguous on this score, since a medical diagnosis implies reduced odds of conception rather than impossibility—natural conceptions after unsuccessful assisted reproduction are far from rare—and because it destabilises identity, leaving people suspended between a parenthood they cannot assume and a childlessness they will not embrace, a state sociologists have described as a “spoiled identity.” Desires, in this reading, encode a deep psychological commitment to parenthood that survives even biological setbacks.

The implications cut two ways. For survey researchers the message is unambiguous: failing to measure infertility risks misreading the declining expectations of affected respondents as irrationality or unstable reproductive planning rather than a rational response to uncertainty. People may continue actively pursuing a child even as their stated expectations fall, deviating from what expectation-based forecasts alone would predict—an insight with consequences for projections of population fertility as parenthood is delayed further. The study also carries caveats: infertility was self-assessed and conditional on having received medical advice, likely undercounting disadvantaged and remote populations who consult doctors less often; two measurement points cannot capture self-perceptions that fluctuate over time; and HILDA records no information on assisted reproduction treatment, whose failures can darken expectations independently of the underlying condition. Still, the central lesson stands. Fertility expectations, the paper concludes, are more likely to be adjusted downward in the face of infertility, while desires tend to remain mostly unaffected—a quiet testament to how tenaciously the imagined future survives an uncertain present.

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.