Parental Control and Fertility History

Parental control over offspring has changed dramatically in Western societies. From a state, before the 19th century, where parents completely controlled their children far into adulthood, a series of laws have shifted these control rights to the current state where even younger children control many aspects of their own lives. We first document the laws that gave parents all the control and argue that these control rights, directly or indirectly, gave parents access to a large fraction of their offspring’s labor income if they so desired. This paper argues that the shift in property rights that followed has important implications for fertility choice. In a simple overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility and altruism, we show that the first-order effect of such a shift is a decrease in fertility—contributing to the decline in fertility during the demographic transition. Depending on the cost structure of children, this decrease may be followed by an increase in fertility, exacerbated by the introduction of pay-as-you-go social security in the 1930s—a confounding factor to generate the baby boom in the 1950s and 1960s.