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This chapter discusses the connection between the policies of parenthood and fertility levels. It argues that the role of family policies in maintaining high fertility levels is often overstated. It also determines that the current Nordic fertility patterns indicate that a sustainable level of fertility in the long run is dependent on parenthood policies with stronger incentives for gender equality. The chapter also discusses the fertility development of the Nordic countries and the ‘Nordic model of family welfare’, and introduces the concept of fertility dynamics.

This chapter provides an overview of the community-level field research on maternal literacy carried out in four countries: Mexico, Nepal, Venezuela and Zambia. It begins with the ways in which fieldwork was conducted and how it changed. The socioeconomic, institutional and demographic trends and local contexts affecting women in those communities are described, for the period when they were school-aged children and years later when they were mothers. The social characteristics of the samples are reported. There is also a description of the contexts of mothers in the UNICEF Nepal Literacy and Health Survey carried out after the four-country study. The substantial variation between communities in urbanization, income, average level of women’s education and mortality and fertility levels, even though demographic transition was under way in all the field sites, suggest that they represent drastically differing environments in which to test hypotheses about the effects of schooling.

The degree to which people experience threats to their survival shapes their basic values. Throughout history, most people lived just above the starvation level, but in the years after World War II, unprecedented prosperity and social welfare safety nets launched an intergenerational shift from survival to self-expression values. When the first postwar birth cohort reached adulthood in the 1960s, student protests erupted, inaugurating pervasive cultural changes. Historically, a coherent set of pro-fertility norms evolved that limits women to producing as many children as possible and that stigmatizes any other form of sexual behavior not linked with reproduction. Because pro-fertility norms require people to repress strong drives, there is a built-in tension between them and their polar opposite, individual-choice norms. Throughout history, societies that lacked pro-fertility norms tended to die out, but in recent decades, a growing number of societies have attained high existential security, long life expectancy, and low infant mortality, opening the way for a shift from pro-fertility norms to individual-choice norms.