Cornell Population Center Innovations in Population Science Speaker Series presents "The Deinstitutionalization of Parenthood in the United States" with Julia Behrman, Associate Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University. This seminar is co-sponsored with CSI.

Over the past two decades, parenthood in the United States has become increasingly delayed, optional, and diverse, suggesting that it is undergoing a process of deinstitutionalization similar to, but distinct from, marriage. This talk explores this possibility through a review of the regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive pillars of parenthood, as well as a novel survey experiment designed to assess the strength of contemporary fertility norms. Whereas institutionalization would imply a prescriptive and unconditional norm characterized by high intensity and broad consensus, the survey experiment reveals a norm that is proscriptive or bipolar, conditional, of moderate intensity, and characterized by low consensus, providing evidence consistent with the deinstitutionalization of parenthood.