For more than 50 years, people in the U.S. have reported that their ideal family size is about 2.5 children (Behrman 2024; Hagewen and Morgan 2005). The large share of Americans reporting ideal family sizes of two children points to the persistence of a widespread “two-child norm” in American family life. Yet, since 2010, the average number of children born per woman in the U.S. has dropped below two and the decline is ongoing (Osterman et al. 2025). 

The persistence and puzzle of the two-child norm

This gap between the number of children Americans say is ideal and the number of children they have is puzzling. For decades, the U.S. showed close alignment between ideal family size and actual fertility, unlike many European countries where this gap has been long-standing (Hagewen and Morgan 2005). The growing disconnect between ideal family size and actual childbearing raises questions about the strength of the two-child norm in the contemporary U.S.
Standard surveys ask people about their ideal family size without considering the complex realities of life today. Factors like financial stress, work demands, partnership status, and caregiving responsibilities can influence whether having two children is truly a top priority. To understand how strong preferences for two children really are, we need to look at the choices people make when juggling multiple competing demands. 

Measuring the strength of preference for two children

We conducted a nationally representative online survey of 1,785 American women of childbearing ages (18-35) using a method called a “conjoint survey experiment” (Behrman, Marshall, and Keusch 2025). Instead of asking for a single ideal number of children, this method presents participants with different family scenarios that vary in terms of number of children and other life factors such as financial status, relationship status, work hours, family policies and so on. Respondents choose which scenario they prefer, revealing the importance of each factor when forced to make trade-offs.
This approach lets us answer two key questions:

1) Do young women prefer two children when considering other family, financial, and work demands?

2) How does preference for two children compare to preference for other factors of family life such as relationship status or financial stability?

Our study found that preference for two children was not significantly stronger than preference for zero, one, or three children when competing work, financial, and family demands were taken into account (Figure 1). However, women clearly preferred families with two children over those with four, thus suggesting preference away from very large families. 

We also found that factors such as relationship status, financial security, work hours, and the availability of family-friendly policies had a stronger influence on family preferences than the number of children. For example, being married (rather than single or living with someone) and having enough money to pay household bills (rather than financially struggling) mattered more for family preferences than whether the family had two children. These results indicate that preference for two children is weak compared to preferences about other dimensions of family life. 
Interestingly, younger women aged 18 to 25 showed a notably higher preference for having no children compared to older women in the sample (Figure 2). This could be because childbearing is less central to the life goals of young Americans. Other studies support this, showing that young adults often place more importance on career fulfillment and social relationships than on having children (Parker and Minkin 2023). Alternatively, this finding could be driven by the younger ages of these respondents who may change their minds about childbearing as they grow older and consider starting families more seriously. 

What does this mean for U.S. fertility? 

Our results help make sense of why U.S. fertility rates are falling even though the two-child ideal remains common in surveys. They indicate that having two children is not a strong preference for many young American women when faced with competing work, family, and financial pressures. Instead, preferences for family size appear less important than other life priorities such as achieving financial stability or finding a long-term partner. While the two-child norm may remain an important cultural reference point, achieving the two-child ideal does not appear to be one of the highest priorities for many American women of reproductive ages.

References 

Behrman, Julia A. 2024. “Ideal Family Size and Reproductive Orientations: An Exploration of Change Over Time in the United States.” Demography 61(5):1535–57. doi:10.1215/00703370-11577510.

Behrman, Julia, Emily A. Marshall, and Florian Keusch. 2025. “An Experimental Approach to Assessing Young Women’s Childbearing Preferences: A Research Note on the United States.” Demography 11962185. doi:10.1215/00703370-11962185.

Hagewen, Kellie J., and S. Philip Morgan. 2005. “Intended and Ideal Family Size in the United States, 1970-2002.” Population and Development Review 31(3):507–27. doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2005.00081.x.

Osterman, M. J. K., B. E. Hamilton, J. A. Martin, A. K. Driscoll, and C. P. Valenzuela. 2025. Births: Final Data for 2023. vol 74, no 1. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics.

Parker, Kim, and Rachel Minkin. 2023.“What Makes for a Fulfilling Life?” .

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Is there evidence of contraceptive adaptation among African migrants to France, away from the practices they used in their origin countries? There are many reasons why this type of adaptation may take place. For example, migrants encounter changes in reproductive healthcare access and the prevalence and availability of contraceptive methods, different norms about method acceptability, new employment opportunities, and reunification with other family members (including spouses).

Research on the relationship between international migration and modern contraceptive usage often compares immigrants to natives, ignoring what happens in origin countries (Ochako et al. 2016; Akinyemi, Odimegwu, and Adebowale 2017; Tapales, Douglas-Hall, and Whitehead 2018). Unfortunately, this one-sided approach cannot tell us much about the relative distance of migrants from these two potential terms of comparison and therefore, indirectly, about their adaptation to the new contraceptive environment. To overcome this limitation and understand whether migration is associated with changes in contraceptive usage, in a recent paper we adopted a multi-sited approach that includes data on individuals in both sending and receiving countries (Behrman et al. forthcoming). Reproductive health outcomes are rarely explored using a multi-sited approach. Existing scholarship that combines data sources focuses on country-level comparisons of fertility differences (Toulemon 2004; Dubuc 2012). Only a handful of studies combine individual-level data from origin and destination contexts to examine fertility (Singley and Landale 1998; Lübke 2014; Impicciatore, Gabrielli, and Paterno 2020) and none of these explores contraceptive outcomes.

We standardized and integrated data from two different sources, one collected in France (destination) and the other collected in six West and Central African countries (origin) between 2006 and 2012. The six sending countries (Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Senegal, Congo Brazzaville, and Congo DRC) all had – and still have – higher fertility and lower usage of modern contraception than France in 2008-2009, thus making this an interesting setting for comparison. 

Data and methods

The data in the analysis come from two sources: the Trajectories and Origins Survey (TeO) and the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). TeO was conducted by the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) and the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) between September 2008 and February 2009. The DHS is conducted throughout sub-Saharan Africa by host country governments in collaboration with ICF International. We use DHS data collected between 2006 and 2012 (Table 1)¹. 

This combined dataset includes information on three groups of women:

A) Non-migrant French women;

B) Women who migrated to France after age 15 from the six West and Central African countries mentioned above;

C) African women in those same countries.

The challenge for this type of analysis is that migrants are selected: this means that African women in France may be (profoundly) different from those who remain in the origin country. They do, in fact, have higher average levels of education and come from smaller families than their non-migrant counterparts. As they differ in several respects, these migrants could have used different types of contraception from their compatriots even if they had stayed home. We addressed this potential source of bias with a weighting methodology that enabled us to compare “like with like” in terms of education, age, religion and other observable background characteristics. 

Adaptation in contraception

Figure 1 presents the predicted probabilities of different types of current contraceptive usage among the three groups of interest listed above.

Our findings indicate that the contraceptive practices of female African migrants in France resemble more closely those of French women than those of women in African origin countries. For example, a predicted 56% of African migrants to France use a modern method of contraception compared to 67% of French women and 11% of women in the corresponding countries of origin. Similar patterns hold for current use of hormonal short-acting contraceptive (38% of French women, 29% of African migrant women in France, 4% of women in the six African origin countries) and long-acting reversible contraception (18% of French women, 19% of African migrant women, less than 1% of women in the six African origin countries). Finally, use of traditional contraceptive methods is significantly higher among women in the African countries of origin (10%) than in the other two groups (0%). 

More refined (multivariate) analyses confirm these findings, and suggest that migration is associated with the following changes in probability of current usage of contraception (in comparison to women in origin countries):

+36 percentage points for modern methods, 

+20 percentage points for hormonal short-acting contraception,

+17 percentage points for LARCs, and 

‒10 percentage points for traditional methods.

Conclusions

Unfortunately, our analysis suffers from a few limitations. First due to the difficulties of locating data with adequate samples of migrants and appropriate information on reproductive health, we must rely on an older data source. Nonetheless, there are no reasons to believe that the contraceptive adaptation process of migrant women outlined above has changed in any significant way in the past 10‒15 years. Second, we could not control for unobserved characteristics such as gender ideology, religiosity, and contraceptive attitudes, which may influence both likelihood of migration and contraceptive usage. 

This notwithstanding, our findings support the general idea that migrant women adapt to the new context (in terms of rules, practices, habits, etc.), and, in this specific case, tend to adopt the contraceptive norms that are prevalent in the destination country.

Migrant women’s contraceptive access and usage should feature more prominently in discussions of migrant fertility. Among policymakers, there is a need for more attention to reproductive policies that make effective forms of contraception widely available to migrant populations in a way that is culturally sensitive and attentive to their reproductive needs. 

Acknowledgements

This work is supported with grant SES 1918274 from the National Science Foundation to Drs. Julia Behrman and Abigail Weitzman and is also supported by grant, P2CHD042849, Population Research Center, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. 

We are grateful to the Centre Maurice Halbwachs for granting access to the data [Trajectoires et origines (TEO)— version complete—2008: (2008, fichier electronique), INED et INSEE (producteur), Centre Maurice Halbwachs (CMH, diffuseur)]

Footnotes

 ¹The DHS can be accessed at: https://dhsprogram.com/ and TeO can be accessed at: http://quetelet.progedo.fr/.

References 

Akinyemi, Joshua O., Clifford O. Odimegwu, and Ayo S. Adebowale. 2017. “The Effect of Internal Migration, Individual and Contextual Characteristics on Contraceptive Use among Nigerian Women.” Health Care for Women International 38 (10): 1075–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/07399332.2017.1345908.

Behrman, Julia A., Michelle A. Eilers, Isabel H. McLoughlin Brooks, and Abigail Weitzman. Forthcoming. “International Migration and Modern Contraceptive Use: A Research Note on African Migrants to France.” Demography. https://doi.org/10.1215/00703370-9611478.

Dubuc, Sylvie. 2012. “Immigration to the UK from High‐Fertility Countries: Intergenerational Adaptation and Fertility Convergence.” Population and Development Review 38 (June): 353–68.

Impicciatore, Roberto, Giuseppe Gabrielli, and Anna Paterno. 2020. “Migrants’ Fertility in Italy: A Comparison Between Origin and Destination.” European Journal of Population 36 (4): 799–825. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-019-09553-w.

Lübke, Christiane. 2014. “How Migration Affects the Timing of Childbearing: The Transition to a First Birth Among Polish Women in Britain.” European Journal of Population / Revue Européenne de Démographie 31 (1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-014-9326-9.

Ochako, Rhoune, Ian Askew, Jerry Okal, John Oucho, and Marleen Temmerman. 2016. “Modern Contraceptive Use among Migrant and Non-Migrant Women in Kenya.” Reproductive Health 13 (1): 67. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12978-016-0183-3.

Singley, Susan G., and Nancy S. Landale. 1998. “Incorporating Origin and Process in Migration-Fertility Frameworks: The Case of Puerto Rican Women.” Social Forces 76 (4): 1437–64. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/76.4.1437.

Tapales, Athena, Ayana Douglas-Hall, and Hannah Whitehead. 2018. “The Sexual and Reproductive Health of Foreign-Born Women in the United States.” Contraception 98 (1): 47–51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.contraception.2018.02.003.

Toulemon, L. 2004. “Fertility among Immigrant Women: New Data a New Approach.” Population and Societies, no. 400 (January): 1–4.

source figure 1: The world bank

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