We live in uncertain times and many of us regularly worry about what the future will bring. And that not only has an impact on our night’s sleep, but also on whether or not we have children, it turns out.
A new study by Katya Ivanova, affiliated with Tilburg University, shows that people, especially women, who look at the future with a negative view have fewer children or at least postpone their desire to have children.
“It is special. In our Western world we live in an extremely prosperous and, if you look at the crime figures, safe times. Yet we do not trust that it will remain that way. Events that take place outside our national borders, wars for example, apparently influence the decisions we make here. We want to offer the generation after us a good future, and not all of us seem to trust that it will happen,” Ivanova said in an interview with AD.
Especially women
Katya Ivanova followed a representative group of Dutch people between 2010 and 2022, the women under 40 and the men under 45 years old at the start of the study. The analysis of this data shows that those who are concerned about the future and especially about the world in which the coming generations will have to grow up, had children significantly less often during the years of the study.
According to Ivanova, this difference is especially notable among women. Those who look very positively at the future even had 2.5 times greater fertility than those who think very negatively about the future.
However, some comments must be made about the study, especially because it is also possible that the participants simply postponed their choice for children to a later date and therefore ultimately grew older.
“But previous scientific research shows that people who postpone the choice of parenthood ultimately have fewer children than people who do not,” says Ivanova.
