Profiling fertility anxiety in young Chinese women: evidence from latent class and random forest analyses

Amid China’s demographic transition and evolving fertility policies, fertility anxiety among young women has attracted increasing attention. However, the multidimensional structure of fertility anxiety remains underexplored, especially with respect to systematic examinations of heterogeneity across marital and fertility statuses and the factors related to these variations. This study collected 2000 valid samples through a questionnaire survey, employed latent profile analysis to identify types of fertility anxiety, and used a random forest model to rank the importance of key influencing factors. The results show that multiple types exist within each marital and fertility status group, and that emotional anxiety has significantly greater discriminative power than cognitive anxiety. Parenting sense of competence, marital quality, perceived social fairness, and social support were identified as core predictive variables. The sources of moderate-to-high anxiety were manifested in actual parenting stress, decision-making uncertainty, and future identity expectations, respectively. The classification accuracy and confusion matrix results indicate that the model demonstrates high robustness in distinguishing fertility anxiety profiles across different marital and fertility statuses. The findings indicate that fertility anxiety is a multidimensional, context-dependent psychological structure jointly shaped by cultural norms, resource adequacy, and relational support. At the policy level, China should adopt differentiated strategies: enhancing parenting competence and childcare service provision, strengthening marital stability and fertility counseling, alleviating gendered role pressures, and improving perceptions of fairness. At the international level, low-fertility countries should tailor support measures to local gender norms and welfare systems, prioritizing the development of emotional regulation interventions and family–work-friendly policies to effectively reduce fertility anxiety and promote overall well-being.