Marriage and family have undergone several transformations throughout history. Nowadays many family structures coexist: nuclear, monoparental, homoparental, recomposed, amongst others. In this context, in many countries, and most recently in Brazil, there is an increasing number of couples who are voluntarily childless. The aim of this article is to perform a bibliographical research on this theme, including Brazilian and international publications. The search was conducted of a variety of databases (Web of Science, PsycINFO, Medline, SciELO, Lilacs, Psicodoc, BVS-Psi, Dedalus) and included complete articles published in indexed periodicals and dissertation abstracts, from the last ten years. The collected results take into account various aspects of this phenomenon - the contemporary choice to remain childless: Declared motivations, the association between this type of choice and professional status, the relationship with factors in the life history and family origins, marital adjustment and satisfaction with life, prejudice and negative stereotypes.
Marriage; Family structure; Childlessness