New in ALCR: Diverse Pathways to Childlessness in Singapore

In this study, my collaborators Prof. Bussarawan Teerawichitchainan and Prof. Christine Ho and I uncover diverse pathways through which Singaporeans become childless, encompassing partnership, education, and occupation domains. The focus on within-group heterogeneity among the childless population contributes to a more holistic understanding of the on-going Second Demographic Transitions in Singapore.

Using Latent Class Analysis (LCA), we identified five distinct profiles of pathways to childlessness:

• The Never-Married Semi-Professionals (41.1%)

• The Low-Flex Blue-Collars (20.3%)

• The Highly Educated Professionals (14.1%)

• The Ever-Married Semi-Professionals (12.7%)

• The Flexible Blue-Collars (11.9%)

Further employing multinomial logistics regressions, we examined sociodemographic correlates to these identified profiles.

• Women’s pathways to childlessness were more standardized and heavily influenced by partnership characteristics, compared to those of men.

• Men were more likely than women to follow the Low-Flex Blue Collars pathway.

• The childless from privileged family background were less likely to follow pathways characterized by disadvantageous education and occupational status.

Lastly, we found rising trends of voluntary childlessness among married childless individuals and increasing heterogeneity in pathways to childlessness across successive birth cohorts, thereby aligning Singapore with some of the predictions of the Second Demographic Transition: rising childlessness, decoupling of marriage and childbearing, and de-standardization of the life course.