Childbearing in the Context of Personal Life Planing and Gender Role Change

Galdauskaite, Dovile

This study focuses on the declining fertility rates in developed countries, particularly in Lithuania which outstands because of controversial gender equality trends, and the potential relationship with changing gender roles and personal life choices. While previous research has highlighted gender equality as a determinant of fertility, there is a lack of individual-level research that investigates how fertility intentions are influenced by personal life plans. The study aims to fill this gap by examining childbearing in the context of the changing gender roles and the self-constructed personal life plans by combining the demographical ideas on the links between low fertility and gender role change (McDonald, 2000) and supplementing it by sociological ideas on personal life planning, do-it-yourself biography and self-constructed identity projects (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Giddens, 1992, 1999).

A mixed-methods approach is employed for the analysis of the social meanings attributed to childbearing and personal life planning. It involves thematic analysis of the sociological literature combined with the analysis of the content from thematic groups on the popular social network platform Facebook in Lithuania, as well as a survey of members of these thematic groups by using Google Forms. The survey questionnaire is developed by using the sociological family conceptualization proposed by Levin (1993).

The distinguished typology of the project of the self and the different women’s lifestyles is (commitment to the child, self-oriented, oriented towards the internalizing experience, and oriented towards the external environment) reveals how the meanings related with children are integrated into personal life projects. Different projects of the self shape different orientations in life plans, and thus similar childbearing-related lifestyles do not necessarily carry the same meanings. In cases of voluntary childlessness, the meanings attributed to childbearing are related with the destruction of the projects of the self and non-constructive time allocation.