What’s Love Got to Do with It? Fertility Ideals Amidst Australia’s Fertility Declines

Fertility ideals, desires, and intentions are among the strongest predictors of fertility. The link between these factors and fertility behaviours, as well as how they are influenced by socio-economic factors, is widely studied. However, much less is known about people’s psycho-emotional motivations for wanting (or not wanting) children. Drawing on self-determination theory and the pathways to belonging framework, we theorise that reproduction serves as a major pathway to create love and connection in people’s lives. 

We hypothesise that childbearing serves to fulfil the fundamental human need to relate and belong; however, the relevance of childbearing as an avenue for relational need fulfilment varies among individuals. Using a novel set of childbearing-motivation items from the 2024 Life in Australia Survey, latent class modelling, and the BCH method, we show that four latent classes of love-related childbearing motivations emerge. 

Two classes, comprising roughly 30% of the population, embrace love-related motivations for childbearing; for example, the idea that the bond to one’s own children is the closest one can possibly have. The other two classes reject love-related childbearing motivations or are neutral towards them. Furthermore, class membership probabilities are associated with respondents’ ideal number of children. Individuals with higher probabilities of class membership in the two love-embracing childbearing motivation classes exhibit a significantly higher ideal number of children. The implications of these findings for fertility behaviours and the current fertility declines are discussed.

The presentation is drawn from joint research with Xiaoxian (Max) Qiu, Ben Edwards, Markus Hahn, and Edith Gray.

Natalie Nitsche is Associate Professor at the School of Demography, ANU. Her research focuses on fertility, family dynamics, and gender inequalities and has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the European Research Executive Agency (REA), the Austrian Research Fund (FWF), and the German Science Foundation (DFG). Before joining the ANU, she worked at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany and the Vienna Institute of Demography in Austria.

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