Chapter 6: Subjective Evaluations of Personal and Public Well-Being and Expected Future Childbearing

Since the Great Recession, birth rates have fallen steadily in the United States and other high-income countries, even as macroeconomic conditions improved and have since remained largely positive. To understand this surprising juxtaposition, scholars are increasingly turning to subjective measures of current and future conditions, hypothesizing that worries about potential negative futures may lead to lower birth rates even when economic conditions are good. Building on this literature, we use survey data from the American Trends Panel (ATP; n = 3,696) to assess how respondents’ satisfaction with their own lives, their understanding of challenges facing young people, their beliefs about problems in their community, and their predictions of future COVID-19 impacts are associated with their expectations for having children. Results show that people who are more dissatisfied with their own lives are less likely to expect a child, controlling for other perceptions as well as objective sociodemographic characteristics. Further analyses reveal that this association is largely restricted to childless women.