Environmentally Childfree? Weighting the Role of Ecology in the Desire to Have a Child Against Other Factors and Investigating How this Relation Operates

Details

Supervisors

Mikolajczak, Moïra ; Saliez, Zoé

Faculty

Faculté de psychologie, logopédie, sexologie et des sciences de la famille

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences psychologiques, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

The ecological crisis raises more and more concerns among individuals. In parallel, childfreeness is increasingly present in society. It raises the following question: does the ecological crisis predicts the desire to have a child? While literature already exists on the topic, some shortcomings exist, leading to ambiguous conclusions. The first objective of this study was to investigate the relation between the ecological crisis (by looking at environmental attitudes and climate anxiety) and the desire to have a child (by distinguishing between the desire to have a child per se and the number of children desired) while addressing the shortcomings of literature. The second objective was to investigate how the ecological crisis would predict the desire to have a child by investigating two potential mediators. To achieve this, 1260 young adults without children answered an online questionnaire. The results suggest that there is indeed a relation between the ecological crisis and the desire to have a child, but this relation is weak and other factors play a more important role in the desire to have a child. This research also indicates that the following two variables play a mediating role in this relation: the fear of the impact of a potential child on the environment and the fear for the future living conditions of a potential child. This study provides more nuance on the role of the ecological crisis in the desire to have children and opens the field to new questions.