Young people looking for a family

A few days ago (on 8 July, in New York), UNFPA – the United Nations Population Fund – launched its “Demographic Futures Survey”, one of the most extensive demographic surveys ever carried out, involving over 108,000 internet-connected young people aged between 18 and 39 in 73 countries around the world.

The scientific advisers and co-authors of the final research report on “Lives, choices and the future: what young people want and what influences their decisions on relationships and parenthood” were a group of researchers from Bocconi University (including the demographer Letizia Mencarini), coordinated by Professor Arnstein Aassve.

What the data reveals is not a generation that has turned its back on family life, but a generation that wants a family and is unable to build one.

The findings are consistent across all geographical regions, from sub-Saharan Africa to Western Europe, and from Latin America to East Asia. Financial security and housing stability top the list of what young people say they need before entering a relationship or having children. Financial insecurity is the main obstacle to both of these goals. Over two-thirds see marriage, or a stable relationship, as part of their ideal future. Yet one in four people aged between 25 and 39 who would like a partner are still single and are not even seeing anyone.

How can this gap be explained? The survey points to a structural pattern that recurs in very different contexts. Young people describe a precise sequence of prerequisites for adult life: first, stable employment; then, a home of their own; then, a partner; and finally, children. When the first link in the chain breaks – and for many, it is all too easy for it to break – every subsequent stage is put on hold.

This is not a generation that has stopped wanting a family: it is a generation waiting for circumstances that never materialise.

Equally important is the gender dimension. Globally, 29 per cent of respondents disapprove of a woman working full-time when her children are under three years old. Young women therefore regard every precondition for parenthood as more important than young men do, not because they want fewer children, but because they correctly anticipate having to bear the greater cost. Where parenthood places greater demands on women than on men, women’s aspirations are more likely to remain unfulfilled. This very expectation becomes the driving force behind delayed and reduced childbearing.

The implications for public policy are clear. Governments around the world have responded to the ‘demographic anxiety’ caused by fertility rates falling well below the replacement level (which is just over two children per woman) with economic incentives, such as baby bonuses, tax relief and one-off payments. These interventions come at the wrong stage of the life course: they focus more on raising children than on the decision to have them, leaving intact the conditions that must first be met. Affordable housing, job security, public care services, and a genuine sharing of care work between partners: these are the missing links. Until they are repaired, cash transfers to families with children will only marginally shift the number and timing of births, without changing what young people are able to achieve in the early stages of their adult lives.

On this World Population Day, the UNFPA survey sends a clear message: young people have not given up on their aspirations and hopes of starting a family. They do not need to be lectured on ‘demographic duty’. They need the conditions that will truly make the life they already desire a reality.

(*) Bocconi University, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Dondena and IEP Research Centres