South Korea’s Fertility Puzzle: A Mismatch Between Sustained Childbearing Desires and Declining Fertility

Although marriage and fertility rates in South Korea have been declining for decades, many perceive having two or more children as the ideal. To understand the mismatch between childbearing desires and realities, this study describes the interrelatedness and incongruity of Korean women’s attitudes toward marriage, childbearing and gender roles by viewing attitudes as a multidimensional construct. Using data from the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families, latent transition analysis was conducted to identify classes of women with similar attitudinal response patterns and develop a typology of their personal dispositions toward family life. Three attitudinal classes emerged from the analysis: Traditional Familism, Transitional Ambivalence and Contemporary Individualism. The first class includes those with traditional attitudes to family formation and gender roles, while the latter two classes indicate a more positive orientation toward parenthood than marriage. This finding is particularly important in a context where having a child outside of marriage is rare and stigmatized, and suggests that low fertility may be potentially related to divergences in marriage and childbearing attitudes. Overall, these findings emphasize the importance of jointly considering attitudes across various family-related domains to better capture the complex attitudinal dynamics associated with women’s perceptions of family life.