A close look at pregnancy planningTiming for Parenthood, the Great Unknown

6 August 2025, by Christina Krätzig

Photo: University of Hamburg / Dingler

The timing of parenthood has far-reaching social implications for demographic development, labor availability, or pension systems, among other things.

At what point do couples decide to have children? How is this decided? And how does this impact society? Economist Dr. Christian Zimpelmann wants to investigate these questions using panel surveys and qualitative interviews. The project is supported by the University of Excellence Hamburg’s Ideas and Venture Fund.

Women in the European Union have their first child around the age of 30, Germans lag a bit behind. The average age for fathers of newborns is 33. That’s what statistics show, but the data reveals little about the parents desired timing. “Surprisingly little is known about this,” explains Dr. Christian Zimpelmann, research associate at the Department of Economics at the University of Hamburg. “These are intimate processes that are negotiated in couple relationships and subsequently have a major impact on society, for example, regarding demographic development or labor availability.”

Women choosing to have children early are still likely to face a career setback, while delaying parenthood comes with a possible decline in fertility. So, do the early thirties make for an ideal compromise between the above? Or does this compromise in timing rather accommodate the needs of prospective fathers? In order to get to the bottom of things, Zimpelmann aims to include these and related questions in large panel surveys, such as the Netherlands’ LISS panel. The LISS online survey representing the Dutch population has been regularly conducted since 2007.

The researcher also plans to conduct qualitative surveys. “This method is rarely used in economics,” he says. Conducting such interviews is time-consuming and evaluations require a lot of effort. Zimpelmann plans to solve at least the first problem using artificial intelligence: He wants to train a chatbot to interact with the couples. “Thus,” he says, “it is irrelevant whether you conduct 20 or 200 interviews.”

He is still undecided whether to also use the AI to evaluate the resulting amount of text. The Idea and Venture Fund enables him to get the project off the ground. His medium-term goal is to acquire further, larger funding, for example as part of the German Research Foundation’s Heisenberg Programme.

The Ideas and Venture Fund is financed from funding granted to the University of Hamburg as part of the Excellence Strategy. One of the conditions for funding from the Ideas and Venture Fund is a substantive link to an emerging field or profile initiative at the University of Hamburg.