Abstract

Today over half the global population lives in states or nations with below replacement-level fertility. In some populations a quarter or more of 50 year-old women have never had children. While many states, economists, evolutionary biologists and demographers (not to mention journalists) puzzle over why so many people are choosing to have few or no children, these patterns raise the more fundamental question of why people have children at all. In this forum we will gather biologists, economists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, demographers and historians to ask: What are children for?

• Do they offer to fulfil an evolutionary urge to transmit genetic attributes or to nurture?
• Do we expect them to perpetuate our identity or lineage, to make us happy, or to provide security in sickness and old age?
• And to what extent can these roles be substituted by non-biological strategies, including adoption, extended family or non-kin support, non-human relationships, or other forms of self-realisation?
• Could social norms change so far as to make biological reproduction a minority choice, as some demographers have suggested?
• What roles do social norms play, and how influential is the two-child norm that has been associated with replacement-level fertility and with many family planning programmes?

The afternoon will feature interdisciplinary conversation and flash talks from academics across the university, followed by a networking reception.

Registration open! https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1151888342039?aff=oddtdtcreator