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Young adults who are not in a romantic relationship often vastly overestimate their likelihood of having children before age thirty, while those who are married predict their family planning with remarkable accuracy. These differences in expectations, along with the role that physical attractiveness plays in women’s family trajectories, reveal how early social circumstances shape long-term personal forecasts. The research was published in The Economic Journal.
People make many life choices, such as pursuing graduate education or saving money, based on when they expect to start a family. Getting accurate data on these expectations is difficult because few surveys ask people to predict their future and then follow up years later to see what actually happened. Economists Yifan Gong, Tyler Skura, Ralph Stinebrickner, and Todd Stinebrickner set out to measure this gap between expectations and reality. They wanted to see if relationship status or other personal traits influence how accurately young adults predict their own family planning.
The researchers used data from the Berea Panel Study, a survey that tracked students from Berea College in Kentucky from their college entrance through ten years after graduation. They focused on 355 individuals who were childless at age twenty-four and followed them until age thirty. At age twenty-four, participants estimated the percent chance that they would have their first child at various future ages. The researchers then compared these predictions to the actual birth records reported by the participants over the following years.
Overall, twenty-four-year-olds overestimated how soon they would become parents. As a group, they predicted a 57.6 percent chance of having a child before age thirty, but only 36.1 percent actually did. The researchers found that relationship status at age twenty-four heavily predicted this gap between expectations and reality.
Married individuals had very accurate expectations, predicting a 76 percent chance of early parenthood and experiencing a 69.2 percent actual rate. Those with a boyfriend or girlfriend overestimated their chances, predicting 57.6 percent compared to an actual 32.2 percent. Single individuals were the most inaccurate, predicting a 42.8 percent chance but only reaching a 13.1 percent outcome.
To understand why single individuals were so far off the mark, the researchers looked at their predictions regarding marriage. Participants had also estimated their likelihood of tying the knot before age thirty. The researchers calculated how much of the miscalculation regarding children was tied to miscalculations about weddings.
Single individuals were highly overoptimistic about finding a spouse by age thirty. They predicted a nearly 50 percent chance of marriage, but only 21.5 percent actually married by that age. The researchers calculated that this overestimation of marriage accounted for a large portion of the error in their family planning predictions. When these single individuals reached age thirty and realized they had fewer children than expected, they tended to heavily revise their total lifetime expectations downward.
The researchers also investigated whether physical attractiveness played a role in these trajectories. They used a peer-rating system based on student ID photos. On average, forty-seven student evaluators rated each participant’s photo on a five-point scale. The evaluators were other college students, making their assessments highly relevant to the dating and marriage environment of the study group. The researchers then mapped these peer ratings against the participants’ family expectations and their eventual outcomes.
A higher attractiveness rating was associated with a higher likelihood of having children before age thirty. However, this pattern was driven entirely by the women in the sample. For women, a one-point increase on the five-point attractiveness scale predicted a massive jump in the likelihood of early motherhood. For men, peer-rated attractiveness had almost zero association with early fatherhood.
The survey data showed that participants accurately perceived this gender difference. Women with higher attractiveness ratings predicted higher chances of early motherhood for themselves, aligning with reality. Men did not factor attractiveness into their own predictions, which matched their eventual outcomes.
Even within the married group, which was generally accurate, attractiveness played a role. Married women with above-average attractiveness ratings had nearly perfect predictions about their early motherhood. Married women with below-average attractiveness ratings overestimated their likelihood of having children before age thirty.
The study relies on a sample from a single liberal arts college with a primarily lower-income student body, meaning the patterns might not universally apply to the broader population. The attractiveness metric was based on a single ID photo taken around the time of college enrollment. A single photograph may not capture physical presence, personal style, or changes in appearance over a decade.
The researchers controlled for self-reported personality traits like intelligence, communication skills, and outgoingness, and the association between attractiveness and family outcomes remained strong. However, in observational survey data, unmeasured social or environmental factors could still influence both relationship status and family planning.
The study, “Fertility Beliefs and Outcomes: The Role of Relationship Status and Attractiveness,” was authored by Yifan Gong, Tyler Skura, Ralph Stinebrickner, and Todd Stinebrickner.