Is Son-only family the route of india’s fertility transition?

Bhaswati Das (), Nowaj Sharif () and Sumit Kumar ()
Additional contact information
Bhaswati Das: Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)
Nowaj Sharif: Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)
Sumit Kumar: Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)

Journal of Population Research, 2025, vol. 42, issue 4, No 9, 21 pages

Abstract: Abstract The latest round of National Family Health Survey (2019-22) and Sample Registration System 2022 observes that India’s total fertility rate has reached at replacement level. This study aimed at analyzing the single-child couples stopping behaviour over all the rounds of NFHS. The study analysed the level and trend of couples with single girl vis-a-vis boy child by their background characteristics and, factors that are influencing the couples to stop fertility with single boy or girl child. Binary logit regression is used to understand the effect of predictor variables on the dependent variable where women with only sons are coded as one (‘1’) and only daughters as zero (‘0’). It is observed that over the years the proportion of couples with single child has increased. However, the increase is more with single son families than among the single daughter. The major determinants of limiting fertility with single son is significant among the urban, educated, nuclear family and the richest standard of living categories. The sex ratio is far from the ideal sex ratio at birth and highly favours the boys among those who has limited their fertility with one child. To arrest the existing son preference government of India, so far has introduced several welfare measures for the girl child. A major call on their survival is given in the Beti Bachao, Beti Padao scheme that was launched in 2015, which is the most important need of the hour to maintain a balanced sex ratio.

Keywords: Single child couple; Replacement fertility; Fertility transition; Son preference; Logit regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12546-025-09405-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joprea:v:42:y:2025:i:4:d:10.1007_s12546-025-09405-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... tudies/journal/12546

DOI: 10.1007/s12546-025-09405-x

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Population Research is currently edited by Santosh Jatrana, Dharmalingam Arunachalam, Aude Bernard, Vladimir Canudas-Romo, Ann Evans, Michael Haan, Brian Houle, Trude Lappegård and Gordon Carmichael

More articles in Journal of Population Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().