Young people who would like to become parents one day say that they would like to have their first child when they are 29 years old.
In the Basque Country, 71.8% of young people under the age of 30 who do not have children state that they would like to have them one day. 26.2%, on the other hand, say they have little or no desire to have children.
In this research, people aged 15 to 29 were asked whether they would like to have children in the future, among other issues. This question has been repeated every year and the percentage of young people who express a desire to have children has been decreasing gradually, resulting in a cumulative decline of more than ten points between 2015 and 2019.
Based on 2019 data, we find that the desire to have children is extremely similar between men (72.1% want very much and quite to have them) and women (71.5%).
If we combine sex and age, we see that as age increases the desire to have children among young women also increases but not among men; there is hardly any difference between the 20-24 and the 25-29 age groups.
Young people who wish to have children one day point out that the ideal age would be 29.7. Women consider the ideal age to be 29.3 and men 30.1.
This ideal age increases slightly with age. People aged 15 to 19 say they would like to become parents when they are 28.3 years old; people aged 20 to 24 say the ideal age would be 29.5; and for those aged 25 to 29 the ideal age would be slightly later, at 31.2.
This ideal age is slightly lower than the actual age at which people have their first child in the Basque Country. According to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), which can be found in the statistics section of the Basque Youth Observatory (in the demography and population sub-section), the average age at which women have their first child is 31, i.e. two years later than what women consider to be the ideal age.
When you ask young people who do not have children but would like to have them whether they think they are likely to have children at that age they consider ideal, 63.9% believe it is very or fairly likely and 30.4% that it is quite or very unlikely to happen.
People aged 25 to 29 display the lowest conviction of having children at the age they think is ideal. More specifically, men aged 25 to 29 show the lowest level of conviction of all.
This data come from a telephone survey conducted by the Basque Youth Observatory, which is dependent on the Department of Employment and Social Policies of the Basque Government, between November and December 2019, in which 1512 young Basque Country residents aged 15 to 29 were interviewed.
