In contrast to what many believe, Swedish men and women with higher incomes have more children, new research from Stockholm University shows. This pattern is particularly clear for men and grows stronger over time: the more money, the more children. But after four children, things change.
In contrast to what many believe, Swedish men and women with higher incomes have more children, new research from Stockholm University shows. This pattern is particularly clear for men and grows stronger over time: the more money, the more children. But after four children, things change.
Unlike previous studies, where researchers looked at people’s income at certain points in life, the study examined how much people earned throughout their lifetime by analyzing Swedish income data over forty years for each birth cohort. For men born in 1940 and onwards, there is a clear relationship between a high accumulated income and more children.
„The very richest men have the most children and this pattern has grown stronger over time. The higher the income, the more children. Increasingly, men who have a very low income more often have no children at all,“ says Martin Kolk, researcher in demography at the Stockholm University Demography Unit, Department of Sociology, and author of the study that was published recently in the journal Population Studies.
„It’s not that the richest have a lot of children, but more often they have two, three or four children compared to those with lower income,“ says Martin Kolk.
For women, the pattern has changed significantly over time. Among women born in the 1940s and 1950s, the study shows that those with lower income have the most children. Then the trend reverses—for later cohorts the pattern is more similar to that of men.
