Coming of Age in Senegal: Young Adults’ Narratives of Delayed Family Formation

Anette Fasang, Humboldt University of Berlin
Luca Maria Pesando , NYU Abu Dhabi

Large-scale evidence suggests that, despite persistently high fertility, transition to adulthood markers have been delayed in sub-Saharan Africa. This study adopts a mixed-methods approach to investigate cohort change in family formation trajectories among women and men in Senegal, as well as young adults’ narratives around delayed family formation. We use repeated cross-sectional data with retrospective information on family lives from the Demographic and Health Surveys, sequence analysis, cluster analysis, and regression methods to examine cohort change in family formation trajectories from ages 12 to 35 for men and women born between 1950 and 1990. We augment the quantitative analyses with life history narratives of Senegalese young adults born between 1980 and 1990, collected in three waves of qualitative autobiographical interviews between 2021 and 2024. The quantitative analyses show that delayed marriage and parenthood with wider birth-spacings increased sharply across cohorts among highly educated urban young adults. In contrast, among less educated young adults in rural areas, cohort change is less pronounced, and family formation continues to vary widely. The qualitative analyses identify four themes behind the observed delays among urban, educated young adults, namely i) lack of economic preconditions for family formation, tied to labor-market insecurities and informality; ii) perceptions of adverse generational change, whereby young adults witness higher hardship today vis-à-vis their parents’ generation, iii) ambivalent dynamics of normative expectations and social control in extended family networks, and iv) uncertainty around desirable adulthood goals and the paths that could reliably lead to realizing such goals.

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 Presented in Session 106. Flash Session Becoming an Adult in the 21st Century