From her teenage years, Bettina Zourli knew she would be the “cool auntie” – but not a mother herself. It’s a choice she recalls having to justify time and time again.
“People told me that I was bound to change my mind, that it was in the female nature to want children,” says the 31-year-old feminist writer and activist, whose Instagram account @jeneveuxpasdenfant ("I don’t want children") has more than 65,000 followers.
Zourli's views on the matter are increasingly common in a country that used to stand out from its European neighbours for its high birth rate, but has recently fallen in line.
Last year, 12.2 percent of French people said they didn’t want to have children, more than twice the number from 2005, according to a study released on Wednesday by national demography institute INED.
The figure is even higher in the 18-29 age group, roughly equivalent to “Gen Z”, with 15% percent of men and 13.3 percent of women saying they do not want to be parents.
The shifting numbers are the latest indicator of changing attitudes to parenthood and the steady erosion of France’s so-called “demographic exception”.
‘Changing social norms’
Zourli says it’s often hard to pinpoint a particular reason for not wanting children.
“It’s just the absence of desire,” she says. “It’s more of an innate thing. You can’t explain why you don’t want kids.”
According to the INED study, neither gender, nor standard of living, nor professional category alone can explain why a growing number of people say they have no desire for children. It points instead to how “attitudes and opinions” increasingly weigh in the balance.
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Didier Breton, a professor of demography at the University of Strasbourg and associate researcher at INED, cautions against reading the figures as evidence of a fading desire to have children.
“It’s more a matter of changing social norms,” he says. “Twenty years ago, it was less acceptable for people to say they didn’t want children, particularly for women. Today, it’s easier to express such a choice.”
Breton points to several possible motives for not wanting children, including the physical transformations associated with pregnancy, a refusal to accept the constraints of parenthood, and a desire to preserve one’s freedom and independence.
“It’s about making life-defining choices, such as prioritising your career, travelling, or simply not reproducing the family model you’ve known,” he says.
Gender inequality
A 2021 survey of people who did not want children found that 86 percent cited the desire to devote themselves to “private life, relationships, friends and travel”. In second place, 71 percent of respondents said they didn’t identify with parenthood.
The latter figure conceals a major gender gap, with 45 percent of women answering “not at all” against 29 percent for men – a discrepancy that is even wider among people aged under 30.
“Gender inequality is a major factor in women’s stance on whether or not they want children,” says French sociologist Charlotte Debest, whose book “Elles vont finir seules avec leur chats” ("They will end up alone with their cats") will be published later this year.
“The unequal division of domestic labour makes it harder for women to see themselves as mothers,” Debest explains. “Many women refuse to accept traditional models of the ‘good mother’ that persist to this day. Such models are out of step with the aspirations of many young women.”
Concern about climate change and the future of the planet is another major factor.
In the 2021 survey, 63 percent of respondents cited environmental protection as a reason not to have children. The high percentage reflects both growing ecological awareness and a tendency to seek an ethical motive for remaining childless, argues Debest.
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“Using the ecological argument gives social legitimacy to people who choose not to have children,” she explains. “Instead of just saying, ‘I don’t want children’, it’s a way to say you’re giving up on children for their own good.”
She adds: “Of course, there are many childless people who are genuinely committed to environmental activism or concerned about the future of the planet.”
The end of the three-child model
Such concerns are fuelling a rapid drop in France’s fertility rate, which slumped to 1.62 children per woman last year, down from 2.02 in 2010, hitting its lowest level since the end of the First World War.
The steady decline in recent years has prompted President Emmanuel Macron to call for a “demographic rearmament” of the nation with new reforms making it easier for people to have children – which are yet to come into law.
According to the INED study, people who do want children are increasingly aiming for smaller families, largely because of economic constraints.
Among women under 30, the desired number of children has fallen from an average of 2.5 in 2005 to 1.9 in 2024, the study found.
“The high cost of living coupled with job and housing instability mean many people feel they simply cannot afford another child,” says Debest. “There is a new awareness of the cost of bringing up children.”
Whereas 26 percent of French people said they wanted three children in 2005, the figure has now dropped to 15.5 percent.
“We are witnessing the erosion of the three-child family model, which was once highly valued in France,” says Breton, for whom the model is “destined to disappear”.
Zourli says she regularly receives Instagram messages from mothers wondering whether they should have a second child, and that many thank her for making them feel “less guilty”.
“The societal pressure to have a nuclear family with a boy, a girl and their heterosexual parents remains strong,” she adds. “But it's being questioned more and more.”
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