Factors Affecting the Decline in Childbearing in Iran: A Systematic Review

The decline in fertility and childbearing tendency in Iran is due tovarious demographic, economic, social, and cultural variables. The present research wasconducted to review studies carried out on factors affecting the decline in childbearing. This systematic review searched for articles published from 2011 to 2017in all the available Iranian and foreign databases, including SID, Magiran, Irandoc,Medlib, Pubmed, Google Scholar, Science Direct, and Proquest using the followingkeywords, “childbearing”, “fertility”, “fertility decline” and “population decline”. Thesearch ultimately led to the inclusion of 53 studies. The main factors affecting the decline in childbearing discussed in the 53reviewed articles were divided to three general categories: 1. Personal and familyfactors, including aging, older age at marriage, current number of children, theduration of marriage, the mean birth spacing, gender preferences, hopefulness, maritalsatisfaction, and quality of life, 2. Socioeconomic factors, including social support,education, occupation and social participation, especially of females, place of residenceand the effect of social networks, 3. Cultural factors, including modernity, urbanizationand industrialization, attitude change towards the value of children, changes in familyvalues and religion. To intervene in the decline in childbearing and to increase the successrate of the designed plans and strategies, policy-makers and planners should providestrategies to deal with all the three noted groups of factors affecting childbearing.