Everything indicates that Quebecers who will give up having children to avoid adding humans on Earth or because they find that the world turns too square are in the minority. In fact, 66% of 19 year olds say they want to have children in their lifetime.
This is what emerges from the bulletin What a family ? published by the Department of Strategic Intelligence and Knowledge of the Ministry of the Family.
The simple questions it asks can be indicators of future demographic trends. The calculations, carried out by the Ministère de la Famille, are based on the analysis of data from a survey by the Institut de la statistique du Québec.
Young women more than young men (73% versus 60%) aged 19 said they wanted to have children.
Determining factors
“The fact of being a woman, of having a spouse intending to have children, of having a defined professional project and of having a significant level of indebtedness are factors which, for young adults, increase the probability of expressing the firm intention to have children in the short or medium term”, one can read.
Conversely, unsurprisingly, “residing in the parental home without intending to leave it, considering post-graduate university studies and being in school rather than working reduce the chances of expressing such intentions”.
Young adults who consider themselves to be very or extremely indebted are, all things considered, “twice as likely to firmly wish to have a child within 5 years”.
The firm intention to have a child in the short or medium term “is thus much more frequent, in proportion, among young people who consider themselves to be poor or very poor (20%) compared to those who consider themselves to be well off. financially (14%)”.
The same is true of young adults who are experiencing food insecurity, “who are more likely, in proportion, to express a firm and foreseeable fertility intention in the short or medium term, compared to those who do not experience such a situation” .
The ideal age
Almost half of the respondents who hope to have children indicated, however, that this project “should probably not materialize before reaching their 25s, but before their 30s”.
About 15% of those who want children say they will wait until their early 30s.
How many children do they want? A very large majority of young people say they intend to have two or more (90%) and few of them say they only want one (6%), while 4% are undecided to the size of their dream family.
The longitudinal study follows 2120 young people in their evolution and the same questions will be asked to them at repeated intervals until the age of 25 years.
It remains to be seen to what extent these respondents’ desire for children will be realized.
Downward trend
In 2021, in Quebec, the number of births (84,900) returned to what it was in 2019, after a decrease in 2020, can we read in the 2022 edition of the Demographic balance sheet from the Statistical Institute of Quebec.
Since 2013, the number of births has been in slight decline and an analysis of the first eight months of 2022 indicates “that the number of daily births for each month of 2022 is below the average for the years 2017-2019”, writes the Institute of Statistics of Quebec.
Current fertility is 1.58 children per woman. In 2021, the average age of mothers at the birth of a first child was 29.5 years.