Father absence and age at first birth: a cross-cultural investigation

Rebecca Sear, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)
David Coall, Edith Cowan University

Considerable research has demonstrated that the presence or absence of fathers in childhood is correlated with their children’s reproductive development and their reproductive outcomes in adulthood. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain these correlations. These include the influence of the presence or absence of paternal investment; the influence of psychosocial stress caused by the lack of a father figure; as well as hypotheses which argue that father absence is a useful indicator of aspects of the environment. In order to tease apart these different (not necessarily mutually exclusive) hypotheses for how fathers influence their children’s reproductive development, we review the existing empirical literature on whether father absence or presence influences their children’s age at first birth. This includes literature from a number of disciplines, including demography, anthropology and psychology; and literature from all world regions. We find that studies of Western populations consistently show that father absence leads to earlier first births for both girls and boys (though the evidence for boys is limited). Studies in non-Western populations, however, show a more variable picture, with father absence sometimes accelerating first births, sometimes having no influence and sometimes delaying first births, especially for boys. We discuss the implications of these results for the hypotheses linking father absence to their children’s reproductive behaviour.