Who becomes a parent while jobless? On the importance of limited opportunities and the normalization of disadvantage

Abstract In many developed countries, men and women postpone parenthood when they are jobless, but this relationship differs between subgroups. We hypothesize that stronger embeddedness in structures of disadvantage engenders a weaker adaptation of fertility behaviour to joblessness due to more limited opportunities in the labour market and the normalization of a disadvantage when it is widespread among relevant others. Using Dutch full-population register data, we select all persons born in the Netherlands between 1988 and 1990 and follow them from 2006 to 2019. An innovative combination of sources in the registers is used to measure the prevalence of joblessness among parents, siblings, neighbourhood peers, and former school peers. Event history models show that jobless men and women postpone first childbearing, but they do so to a lesser extent when they are lower educated and when disadvantage is more prevalent in the social environment.