Working parents with at least one child who use formal childcare services are not always more likely to have further children. As Jonas Wood shows, the European evidence is mixed, and several other factors are probably at play.
In a 2025 N-IUSSP article, I showed that working mothers in Belgium who use formal childcare for their first child are more likely to have a second. While part of this link reflected differences in who manages to secure a childcare place, the experience of using childcare itself seemed to matter: it presumably helps mothers reconcile work and family life and makes the prospect of another child more manageable. But Belgium is just one case, and a relatively supportive one when it comes to childcare provision. This raises an important question: does the same relationship hold across Europe? Or does the link between childcare use and continued childbearing depend on national context?
In a new study (Wood 2025), I examine this question using comparable survey data from ten European countries. The results show that the answer is far from uniform. In some countries, using formal childcare is associated with a higher likelihood of having another child. In others, the association is negative. This cross-national variation suggests that formal childcare uptake can support continued fertility, but only under certain conditions.
Why childcare use might matter for fertility
Formal childcare is often seen as a key policy lever because it helps parents, especially mothers, remain in paid work by reducing the time and energy required for caregiving. At the macro level, countries with more extensive childcare systems tend to have higher fertility, yet research has repeatedly shown that the direct impact of family policies on birth rates is often modest, particularly in low-fertility settings. As Gauthier and Gietel-Basten (2025) state, this implies that explicitly pronatalist policies can easily become “hostages to fortune” if evaluated solely on their ability to raise birth rates.
To date, little is known about whether individual parents who actually use formal childcare are more likely to have another child (Wood, 2025; Neyer and Andersson, 2008). The study presented here does not focus on explaining aggregate fertility trends, but on the possible individual-level life course link between formal childcare uptake and continued childbearing, to better understand how work, family, and policy interact in parents’ everyday lives.
From a life-course perspective, there are good reasons to expect such a link. Parents who have already used formal childcare may anticipate lower opportunity costs of another birth, feel less dependent on informal care, and experience less stress in combining work and family life. Using childcare may also shift norms, making the dual-earner, two-child family model feel more achievable. At the same time, childcare users are a selective group. They tend to be more educated, more strongly attached to the labour market, and more economically secure, and these are factors that also influence fertility decisions.
Studying ten countries with comparable data
To move beyond single-country studies, I used data from the Generations and Gender Survey (GGS), a large cross-national panel survey. The analysis covers ten European countries: Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia.
I focused on working parents with at least one child and examined whether those who used formal childcare were more or less likely to have another child in the following years. To account for the fact that childcare users differ systematically from non-users, I combined propensity score matching with hazard models, allowing a more credible comparison between similar parents who did and did not use childcare. It should be noted that, in such a selection-on-observables strategy, remaining bias in the estimates might occur due to the omission of confounders form the matching criteria (Kreyenfeld, 2021).
Positive links in some countries, negative in others
The main finding is clear: the association between childcare use and subsequent childbearing varies strongly across countries. In five countries (France, Germany, Russia, Lithuania, and Hungary) formal childcare use among working parents is associated with a higher likelihood of having another child (Figure 1). These are also countries where childcare use is relatively common in the GGS data, suggesting that childcare is more accessible, socially accepted, or easier to integrate into everyday life.
In contrast, Georgia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Bulgaria, and Austria show predominantly negative associations (Figure 2). In these contexts, parents who use formal childcare are less likely to have another child than similar parents who do not.
One potential explanation for such cross-national variation lies in how widespread and normalized formal childcare is. In contexts where many working parents use childcare, doing so may reduce stress, reinforce norms of work–family compatibility, and create a supportive environment for having another child. In such settings, childcare use may genuinely ease the path to continued childbearing. In countries where formal childcare is less common, using it may be more strongly associated with career-oriented parents who prioritize employment continuity. For these parents, childcare might facilitate deeper labour market attachment, which could in turn make additional childbearing more difficult later on. In such cases, a potential positive effect of childcare may be offset, or even reversed, by career dynamics.
Looking ahead
The results suggest that childcare policies matter not only in terms of availability, but also in how they shape parents’ everyday experiences. We speculate that if childcare is affordable, flexible, high-quality, and widely used, it can help parents feel that work and family life are compatible, and support continued childbearing. The same policy instrument may not have the same effect, however, if access is limited, socially contested, or tied to demanding work trajectories.
This study is one of the first to examine the link between formal childcare use and subsequent childbearing across a diverse set of European countries using comparable data. At the same time, it raises new questions. Future research should explore how specific design features (such as cost, opening hours, quality, and flexibility) shape the fertility effects of childcare uptake at the individual level. More recent data are also needed to assess whether these patterns have changed as childcare systems have continued to expand. What is clear, however, is that formal childcare is not a uniform fertility policy tool. Its effects depend on context, which could point to variation in policy design, norms, and lived experience.
References
Gauthier AH and Gietel-Basten S. (2025) Family Policies in Low Fertility Countries: Evidence and Reflections. Population and Development Review 51: 125-161.
Kreyenfeld M. (2021) Causal Modelling in Fertility Research: A Review of the Literature and an Application to a Parental Leave Policy Reform. Comparative Population Studies 46.
Neyer G and Andersson G. (2008) Consequences of Family Policies on Childbearing Behavior: Effects or Artifacts? Population and Development Review 34: 699-724.
Wood J. (2025) Does Formal Childcare Uptake Stimulate Fertility? Formal Childcare Usage and Second Births. Population Research and Policy Review 44: 42.