This thesis contains three studies that address the issues of childbearing and working life and the connection between working life and success in family life. The first two studies investigate third-birth rates in two West-European countries, based on two national surveys concerning the family and working life. We focus on trends in patterns of childbearing and working life in France and Sweden over the period 1970-1994. The third paper focuses on the patterns of union dissolution for four groups of immigrants in Sweden, namely a sample of respondents from Poland, Turkey, Chile and Iran. The method used in all three papers is the event-history analysis and the data is individual-level data, with information on several biographies.

Our first study is concerned with third-birth rates in Sweden. Our purpose is to investigate whether there are educational differentials, or perhaps differences by occupational status, in the likelihood for women to have a third child. Several paths to the third child are identified, one of women with a university education and another of women with preference for more children, reflected by marriage after having the first or the second child or by persistent working experience followed by household work.

The second paper is a comparative study of third-birth rates in France and Sweden. We investigate two issues, 1) whether the positive relationship between educational attainment and fertility found earlier for Swedish women also exists for Swedish men, and 2) whether the fertility differentials by educational attainment are specific to Sweden or can be found for the fertility of educated women in other countries too, represented here by France. Our results indicate that parents with strong work attachment face more obstacles in France than in Sweden in their progression to a third birth. Improved education reduces men's and women's rates of transition to a third birth in France, whereas in Sweden the effect of educational attainment is the reverse. Generous parental benefits and flexible work practices are found as crucial means for facilitating the work and childbearing strategies of dual-earner families.

The third paper focuses on men and women with different cultural backgrounds who have migrated to Sweden in the 1980s and on their behavior regarding working and family life. Our purpose is to investigate the relationships between economic stress and marital tension among immigrants in Sweden. The results show that all immigrants groups except Turks have high disruption risks when one of the family members loses his/her job. Families with nontraditional gender roles are exposed to high risks of disruption. Circumstances of immigration are important: the higher union stability of political refugees was an unexpected finding. Access to social network contributes to union stability, whereas further human capital investment in Sweden or marrying a native Swedish partner will increase the dissolution of the relationships.