Most respondents in the survey do not think that having two or three children is better than having one. Credit: Getty Images/Best View Stock RF.
Surveys in industrialized countries used to show that a family with two children was seen as ideal, but that has changed, according to a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences coordinated by Arnstein Aassve, a demographer at Bocconi University in Milan1. Aassve’s team interviewed nearly 20,000 respondents in China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Italy, Spain, and Norway, all low-fertility countries.
Respondents were asked to rate the contribution of ten factors to a successful family: number of children, parents’ marital status, household income, respect from the larger community, gender roles, work-family balance, children’s education, quality of communication among household members, contact with the extended family, and financial support for children. The authors presented each participant with six short descriptions of family arrangements, where the ten factors were varied randomly, and asked them to assess how successful those family arrangements were.
Despite the huge cultural and political differences between the countries surveyed, the scientists were surprised to find similar results. “People largely tend to have similar ideas about what the family is supposed to be and what really matters, regardless of the country and of the culture,” Aassve comments.
While respondents consider a childless family less successful than one with one child, they do not think that having two or three children is better than having one. What they said matters most is communication among family members, connection with grandparents and the extended family, and being respected in the community.
What does vary significantly across countries is the importance of the parents’ status. Marriage is considered an important factor in South Korea, Japan, and Singapore, while this is not the case in Europe, China, and the United States. And while respondents in all countries think that having a lower-than-average income makes a family less successful, European participants do not view a higher-than-average income as an element of success, as instead did participants in the United States, China, South Korea, and Japan. This could be explained by the more extensive welfare support European parents can sometimes rely upon.
