Reconfiguring Care across Generations: Delayed Retirement and Women’s Fertility Decisions in China

Since marketization in China, the state has strategically shifted the care responsibilities from state-owned enterprises to individual families through privatization, specifically to women. Meanwhile, Chinese female labor force participation has remained exceptionally high, reaching 60% or above since 1990, surpassing regional and global averages. Mothers shoulder the dual burdens of work and childcare under immense pressure, which may shape their fertility decisions. Consequently, many families turn to grandparents' intergenerational support, encompassing both childcare and financial support. Grandparents' participation in caring for infants and young children ranges from 60% to 70%. They also commonly provide financial transfers to young families. However, faced with rapid population aging and a continued decline in births, the government officially enacted a gradual delayed-retirement reform in 2025 and, since 2021, allowed couples to have three children. Delayed retirement may reshape the family's existing intergenerational support, with uncertain implications for their reproductive arrangements. Therefore, it's crucial to examine whether delayed retirement will impact young families' fertility decisions to have two or more children and, if so, how this impact will manifest. This potential impact may unfold through two competing "support" pathways. On the one hand, delayed retirement raises grandparents' wage income and reduces the burden of old age, which may lead to financial transfers that help cover child-rearing costs and potentially increase births — the "income effect". On the other hand, intergenerational care is a cost-effective alternative to formal childcare services, facilitating time transfers between generations and providing greater flexibility for mothers. Delayed retirement can disrupt this support and reduce the likelihood of multiple births — the "crowding-out effect". Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) 2016–2022, this study examines two pathways through which delayed retirement affects fertility decisions, with grandparental financial and childcare support serving as mediators, respectively. The analytic sample comprises 9,908 married women aged 20–49 with at least one prior birth. Because the formal reform postdates our sample period, we measure delayed retirement as post-retirement employment (i.e., continued work past the statutory retirement age). This study estimates a unified parallel-and-serial mediation model with bootstrap confidence intervals, complemented by two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation that uses the number of grandparents (0–4) without pension coverage as an instrumental variable to address potential reverse causality. The findings show that delayed retirement significantly reduces grandparental childcare and thereby suppresses fertility (time channel), while simultaneously raising grandparents' wage income and modestly increasing financial transfers and fertility (economic chain). However, the negative effect through reduced grandparental childcare is overwhelmingly larger than the small positive effect through extra financial transfers, demonstrating that monetary transfers cannot substitute for grandparental childcare. These findings reveal the structural tension between intergenerational time and money resources in Chinese families and suggest that delayed retirement and pro-fertility policies are in conflict at the family level, calling for coordinated policies that explicitly protect intergenerational care-support systems.