Fewer babies do not automatically mean less desire for children

Europe’s demographic numbers are striking. The EU fertility rate fell to 1.34 births per woman in 2024, the lowest level recorded since comparable EU data began in 2001. Only 3.55 million babies were born that year, down 3.3% from 2023, while the average age of women having their first child continued to rise. It is tempting to look at those figures and conclude that younger generations simply want fewer children. But fertility rates tell us what happened, not necessarily what people hoped would happen. That distinction matters, because research increasingly points to a gap between aspiration and reality rather than a straightforward rejection of parenthood.

A 2026 UNFPA study of more than 108,000 internet-connected young adults aged 18 to 39 across 73 countries found that partnership and parenthood remain important aspirations for many respondents. Two children remained the most common ideal family size in five of seven world regions. Yet the same respondents placed a long list of conditions around becoming a parent: 88% considered financial security important, 87% stable employment, and 85% emotional readiness. The survey is not nationally representative, but the pattern is revealing. The question for many young people may no longer simply be whether they want children. It is whether the right conditions will ever align enough for them to feel ready.

Many still want children, but uncertainty is growing

Belgium gives us a particularly useful Gen Z snapshot. A 2024 study of 1,700 adolescents in Flanders found that 60.2% wanted children in the future, 24.7% were undecided, and 10.8% did not want children. Among those who were unsure or not interested, financial concerns and the fear of losing personal freedom were among the most important reasons. That is not a generation overwhelmingly rejecting parenthood. But one in four being undecided is significant, because it suggests that children are no longer assumed to be part of the adult script for everyone.

The picture also changes from country to country. Research published in 2025 tracking fertility preferences among young adults in Italy between 2012 and 2022 found an increasing tendency among more recent cohorts to say they did not want children or did not expect to have them during their lifetime, particularly among women. So we should avoid replacing one cliché with another. It would be just as simplistic to say that Gen Z definitely still wants children as it is to say that Gen Z has given up on parenthood. Both dynamics are visible. For many young adults, parenthood remains part of the imagined future. For others, childlessness is increasingly an active and legitimate life choice. And between those two groups sits a large number of people who simply do not know yet.

Feeling ready has become a much higher bar

This is where the final article connects strongly with the previous three. If adulthood feels less linear, marriage happens later, and housing is harder to secure, parenthood is inevitably pulled into the same uncertainty. A recent Polish study of 1,092 respondents identified two broad types of barriers to having children. The first was structural: material circumstances, housing, finding a suitable partner, and career ambitions. The second was psychological and social: fear of parenthood, lack of support, and reluctance to give up aspects of one’s current life. That distinction is important because discussions about falling fertility often become almost entirely economic.

Cheaper housing, better childcare, more secure jobs, and stronger family support all matter enormously. But they do not explain everything. A young adult can have an acceptable salary and still wonder whether they are psychologically ready to become responsible for another human being. They can have a partner and still worry about what parenthood will do to the relationship. They can want children and simultaneously value the freedom, mobility, travel, friendships, and career they have built. Previous generations also worried about responsibility, but today major life choices are more often expected to be conscious choices rather than automatic steps. When parenthood is no longer simply what happens next, the decision itself can become heavier.

Housing is part of the baby question

The connection with the previous article in this series is particularly strong. A 2025 study using population data from the Netherlands between 2012 and 2023 found that rising house prices were associated with lower fertility among younger cohorts. Part of the relationship could be explained by fewer young adults becoming homeowners and by lower fertility among renters in increasingly expensive housing markets. Housing therefore affects much more than where Gen Z lives. It shapes whether there is enough space for a child, whether a couple feels stable enough to plan long term, whether they can remain in the same city, and whether another major financial commitment feels realistic.

This is exactly why the four articles in this series belong together. Adulthood, marriage, housing, and children are not isolated choices. They interact. If leaving the parental home is delayed, living with a partner may be delayed. If independent housing becomes expensive, marriage or children may move later. What sometimes looks like a series of separate generational preferences may actually be several consequences of the same structural pressures. Delay should therefore not automatically be read as rejection.

The invisible question of who will do the work

There is another condition that matters enormously: who will actually carry the burden of parenthood? Research comparing fertility intentions in Finland, Germany, and Spain found that economic stability and caregiving burdens were strongly connected to short-term intentions to have a child. Stable employment and lower care burdens were associated with higher intentions, while economic insecurity and heavier caregiving demands reduced them. The patterns differed between countries and genders, which tells us something important. Parenthood is not only a financial decision. It is also a negotiation about equality.

You can want children and still worry that having them will alter your career much more than your partner’s. You can support gender equality in principle and still live in a system where childcare, school schedules, parental leave, working hours, and workplace expectations make equal parenting difficult in practice. For Gen Z women especially, the question may increasingly become not only “Do I want children?” but “What would having children require me to give up?” That is a different kind of decision from simply following the next expected life stage.

Spain shows the gap particularly clearly

Fresh Spanish data makes the distinction between desire and reality difficult to ignore. Spain’s 2025 Fertility Survey found that 69% of women aged 18 to 55 wanted at least two children, while 15.5% wanted none. Among women aged 18 to 34, almost half wanted two children in total and another 20.2% wanted three or more. At the same time, 34.8% of women who had children said they had fewer than they wanted. Spain simultaneously has one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe, at just 1.10 births per woman in 2024.

Those two realities can exist at the same time. Low fertility does not automatically mean low desire for children. Sometimes it means that the children people imagined never arrived, arrived later, or became harder to fit into the life they were actually able to build. That gap between imagined family life and lived reality may be one of the most important signals in the entire debate.