Moving Closer for the Grandchild? Fertility and the Geographical Proximity of a Mother and Her Adult Daughter in a Dynamic Perspective

Abstract

Recent research has analyzed how the geographical distance between moth­ers and adult daugh­ters influ­enced the daugh­ters’ fer­til­ity tran­si­tions. The inverse rela­tion­ship has received less atten­tion: that is, whether a daugh­ter’s fer­til­ity—her preg­nan­cies and the ages and num­ber of her chil­dren—is affected by her geo­graph­i­cal prox­im­ity to her mother. The cur­rent study helps to close this gap by con­sid­er­ing moves by either adult daugh­ters or moth­ers that lead them to live nearby again. We use Bel­gian reg­is­ter data on a cohort of 16,742 first­born girls aged 15 at the begin­ning of 1991 and their moth­ers who lived apart at least once dur­ing the observed period (1991–2015). Estimating event-his­tory mod­els for recur­rent events, we ana­lyzed whether an adult daugh­ter’s preg­nan­cies and the ages and num­ber of her chil­dren affected the like­li­hood that she was again liv­ing close to her mother and, if so, whether the daugh­ter’s or the mother’s move enabled this close liv­ing arrange­ment. The results show that daugh­ters were more likely to move closer to their moth­ers dur­ing their first preg­nancy and that moth­ers were more likely to move closer to their daugh­ters when the daugh­ters’ children were older than 2.5 years. This study con­trib­utes to the grow­ing lit­er­a­ture inves-ti­gat­ing how fam­ily ties shape (im)mobil­ity.