Diversity in Pathways to Parenthood: Patterns, Implications, and Emerging Research Directions

This review examines and synthesizes recent research on pathways to parenthood. We begin by providing basic information about patterns, differentials, and trends and discussing adoption and new reproductive technologies. We next turn to several areas of inquiry that became particularly prominent in the last decade: the continued "decoupling" of marriage and childbearing, the parental relationship context of nonmarital childbearing, family structure stability, multiple partner fertility, and racial and ethnic variation in childbearing patterns. We then consider the implications of this body of scholarship and identify avenues for future research. Throughout, we highlight racial/ethnic and social class variation in childbearing patterns. Key Words: cohabitation, demography, family structure, inequality, parenthood, U.S. families. How a family forms and who forms it are fundamental issues in family research. As attested by a large body of academic work and by ongoing debates in the media, political forums, and popular culture, the answers to these questions matter. Moreover, the study of who becomes a parent, when, why, and in what context adds to our understanding of a range of topic domains - social change, economic advantage and disadvantage, and demographic trends, among others. This article focuses on fertility and childbearing patterns, the contexts in which parenthood occurs, and the implications of these patterns. We review research from 1999 through 2009 and synthesize the major contributions of this body of work, focusing largely on studies appearing in peer-reviewed journals from a variety of social science disciplines. Our research began using the Social Sciences Citation Index, a database including 1,700 peer-reviewed journals in roughly 50 disciplines. We also performed targeted, hands-on searches of several interdisciplinary journals, including Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Family Issues, and Demography. It is essential to keep in mind the familial backdrop of changes that informs recent research on childbearing (Cherlin, 2010). These include the increasing age at marriage, high levels of marital dissolution, the growing prevalence of cohabitation, and rising proportions of births taking place outside of marriage, to name but a few. It is against this backdrop that the research synthesized here should be contextualized. What emerges is a clear, if complex, picture: Although a baby born today is more likely to be born to a mother-father married couple than to any other family type, he or she has many contemporaries who are born to single mothers, same-sex parents, unmarried cohabiting parents, or who live with adoptive parents. This review is divided into two main sections. The first section provides an overview of contemporary childbearing patterns, reviewing basic descriptive findings about childbearing trends and patterns, the timing of childbearing, childlessness, adoption, and new reproductive technologies. The second section identifies and discusses several major research questions that form key areas of recent and emerging scholarship about childbearing and the ramifications of the parental context in which childbearing occurs. We conclude by summarizing the implications of the research reviewed and identifying directions for future inquiry. BASIC FACTS ON CHILDBEARING PATTERNS TRENDS AND DIFFERENTIALS In 2007, just over 4.3 million babies were born in the United States, bringing the birthrate to population replacement level for the second time since 1971 (B. E. Hamilton, Martin, & Ventura, 2009). Of all births occurring in 2007, the majority were to married couples - a little more than 60%. In 1970, this figure stood at a substantially higher 89.3%. This change is accounted for in part by the rising share of births to unmarried women or couples, from 10.7% in 1970 to 39.7% in 2006 (B. E. Hamilton et al.; Ventura & Bachrach, 2000). …