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Rich societies have witnessed a postponement of parenthood over the past two decades, and young adults' economic conditions are often invoked to explain this trend. However, macro‐level trends in both "subjective" perceptions of economic uncertainty and "objective" measures of actual income provide no satisfactory explanation for the postponement of parenthood. We propose a potential solution to this puzzle by hypothesizing that the economic prerequisites of parenthood have increased over the past two decades. We expect that this has raised the degree of perceived economic certainty and the level of income that people wish to achieve before having a first child. To test this hypothesis, we draw on individual‐level longitudinal data from seven countries from the Comparative Panel File. Our findings show that young adults' perceived economic uncertainty is not consistently associated with the transition to parenthood. Moreover, the effects of perceived economic uncertainty did not change over time. In contrast, we find consistent evidence that the link between income and first birth has become more strongly positive over the past two decades. This is true mainly for women but also for men, and suggests that increasing income prerequisites are a key mechanism behind the postponement of parenthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family formation, a process that includes union formation, fertility, and their timing and order, has become increasingly diverse and complex in Europe. We examine how the relationship between socio-economic background and family formation has changed over time in France, Italy, Romania, and Sweden, using first wave Generations and Gender Survey data. Competing Trajectories Analysis, a procedure which combines event-history analysis with sequence analysis, allows us to examine family formation as a process, capturing differences in both the timing of the start of family formation and the pathways that young adults follow. Regarding timing, socio-economic background differences in France and Sweden have remained relatively small, whereas in Italy and Romania higher parental education has become more strongly associated with postponement. Pathways tend to diverge by socio-economic background, particularly in Sweden and France. These results indicate that while family formation patterns have changed, they continue to be stratified by socio-economic background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]