New UNFPA data suggests young people in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have not given up on children, but life keeps getting in the way.
Young people across Eastern Europe and Central Asia are not turning their backs on family life. They are simply running out of road to get there. That is the central finding of new regional data released this week by UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, timed to land ahead of World Population Day on July 11. The figures, drawn from the agency’s global Demographic Futures Survey, complicate a narrative that has taken hold in the region: that falling birth rates reflect declining interest in having children at all.
The survey, conducted in 2025 among more than 13,500 internet-connected respondents aged 18 to 39 across eleven countries and territories (Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, North Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan) paints a picture of striking optimism. Some 65 per cent of respondents feel positive about their future, against 50 per cent in a comparison group drawn from Western Europe and East Asia. That confidence persists despite young people in the region reporting sharply higher anxiety over conflict, economic crisis and unemployment than their Western and East Asian peers.
Marriage and parenthood remain the dominant life goals. Seventy-nine per cent of respondents want to marry, compared with 63 per cent in the comparison countries, and 87 per cent cite joy and happiness as an important or very important reason to have children. Most want two or more of them: the mean ideal is 2.6 children for women and 2.9 for men in the region’s lower-fertility countries, rising to 3.7 in higher-fertility ones.
What they get is another matter. Among respondents aged 35 to 39, more than one in five women remains childless, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, not by choice. Ninety-five per cent of childless women in that age bracket say they still want children, a sharp contrast with comparison countries, where remaining childless is far more often a deliberate decision. The gap between desired and actual family size runs to 1.25 children among women and nearly two among men. Ukraine shows the widest divergence: women there report an ideal of three children but end up, on average, with just over one.
A structural disconnect
Florence Bauer, UNFPA’s regional director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, argues the disconnect is structural rather than attitudinal. “Far from turning their backs on family life, young people in the region simply don’t see the conditions are in place to be able to achieve their aspirations,” she said. Financial insecurity tops the list of barriers to both partnership and parenthood, the survey found, followed by a shortage of suitable housing, health problems, difficulty finding a partner, and the uneven division of childcare and housework between men and women.
Underlying all of this, the survey suggests, is a rigid sequence that young adults across the region feel bound to follow: secure employment first, then independent housing, then a stable partnership, and only then children. Break one link in that chain and everything downstream stalls. It is a sequence that also explains, Bauer suggests, why policies built around financial incentives for having children tend to fail.
“This survey makes clear why policies trying to influence young people’s decisions about having children through incentives or pressure don’t work. They intervene at the wrong stage, at the end of a chain of life milestones whose earlier links are often broken,” she said. “What we need instead is policies that remove the barriers leading up to this decision—in employment, housing, health and gender roles in the family—so that young people can realise their life and family aspirations.”
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