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As other Nordic countries, Finland has enjoyed stable, close to replacement level, completed cohort fertility. This stability seems to be broken during the past decade when Finland has witnessed a steady decline in period fertility. Women born in the 1980s are likely to have significantly lower levels of completed fertility than earlier cohorts. In this presentation, we follow childbearing and partnership transitions among Finnish women born in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s. Our goal is to detect changes in the patterns of union formation, union stability and childbearing. We employ longitudinal individual level register data from the period of 1987–2018 and event history methodology. The study shows that younger cohorts are postponing union formation, postponing birth within a union, and experiencing decreasing union stability. These tendencies might change the links between union formation and childbearing and potentially lead to the decline in the average number of children per women. Since the reproductive window is still open for the youngest cohort that we observe, there is space for debate whether policy interventions may help smoothen the change.

Speakers:

Leen Rahnu (Postdoctoral student of family demography at the University of Turku and researcher at the Estonian Institute for Population Studies)

Marika Jalovaara (Senior researcher in University of Turku, Manager of NEFER birth study)

Location: Zoom (link will be sent to people who have registered)

The series of open seminars is organized by the TLU Center of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Life Studies (IET), funded by the European Union Regional Development Fund (ASTRA project "TLU TEE Tallinn University as a promoter of intelligent lifestyle")