Introduction

The impetus for our work on the timing and spacing of children has come from two surveys done by the University of Montreal in 1971 (Henripin and Lapierre-Adamcyk, 1974 and 1975). These surveys are unusual in that they contain questions on work experience before marriage, after marriage but before the birth of the first child, at the time of the interview, and the number of years worked after marriage. The questions enable one to reconstruct the proportion of a woman's time spent working during the child-rearing period. The usual questions are asked concerning socioeconomic background and pregnancy history. Because the time of the mother spent with her children is thought to be an important determinant of child ‘quality’ – begging the question of just what that is – and because female labour force participation is known to be greatly inhibited by the presence of young children (Sweet, 1973), it was clear to us that we had an almost unique opportunity to explore the joint relationship among the timing and the spacing of children and female labour force participation. In addition, the surveys contained an impressiveset of questions related to the couple's preferences for children. These questions included not only the usual inquiry concerning the ideal number of children and the number of children wanted by the couple, but also more abstract questions concerning couples in general, and questions related to preferences about the timing and spacing of children.