Women in the EU are increasingly becoming mothers for the first time

NOS News•today, 08:39

Women in the European Union are having their first child later and later. In ten years, the average age has risen from 28.8 to 29.7 years. This is reported by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) and Eurostat.

Women in the Netherlands are on average slightly older when they give birth for the first time: the average age here in 2023 was 30.3 years. This was also the case in the two years before.

But Dutch women are not the oldest when they first have a child. The age is highest in Italy and Spain: 31.7 and 31.6 years old respectively. Bulgaria is at the bottom of the list. There, women have their first child on average at the age of 26.6.

In total, around 164,000 children were born in the Netherlands in 2023. More than 75,000 of them were the mother’s first child. About 37 percent of the total number of births that year were second children.

The number of children a woman has on average has been declining throughout Europe for years. In 2010, Dutch women had an average of 1.80 children, which will decrease to 1.43 children per woman in 2023, according to provisional figures from Statistics Netherlands. This is the lowest figure since the first measurement in 1975.

The fact that the average number of children per woman is declining is mainly because more and more women, and their partners, are choosing not to have children for various reasons. For women who do start a family, the number of children they have is stable at 2.1 children per woman.

In France, women have the most children on average. There, the average number of children in 2022 per woman was 1.79 children. This figure was lowest in Malta, at 1.08 children per woman. Spain is also low on this list with an average of 1.16 children, and Italy is above that with 1.24 children.