A new study compares people’s attitudes towards voluntary childlessness across 27 countries and finds that different results may emerge depending on whether the measurement focuses on social expectations or perceived consequences of childlessness. Ivett Szalma of the HUN-REN Center for Social Sciences in Budapest, Hungary, in collaboration with Marieke Heers (FORS – the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences) and Maria Letizia Tanturri from the University of Padova, Italy (within the framework of the Childzero project), present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on March 19, 2025.
More and more people in Europe are choosing not to have children, prompting researchers to study how attitudes towards voluntary childlessness may be evolving. However, such attitudes can be nuanced, and it has been unclear how to measure people’s perspectives most effectively. To shed new light, Szalma and colleagues conducted a new analysis of data from 27 countries that had been collected for two prior surveys.
The researchers aimed to distinguish between two different categories of attitudes on voluntary childlessness: prescriptive versus proscriptive. Prescriptive attitudes focus on the expectation for people to have children, and can be measured with questions like, “How much do you approve or disapprove if a woman/man chooses never to have children?” Meanwhile, proscriptive attitudes highlight perceived negative consequences of childlessness, and are measured with questions about whether people need to have children to be fulfilled.
The analysis revealed that certain sociodemographic characteristics were statistically linked in different ways to prescriptive versus proscriptive attitudes towards voluntary childlessness. People in countries with higher childlessness rates tended to have higher acceptance of voluntary childlessness in a proscriptive sense, but no such trend was seen for prescriptive attitudes about consequences.
People in countries with more gender equality had higher rates of acceptance in both a prescriptive and proscriptive sense – perhaps because here, women often play a larger role in economic stability and are seen in roles beyond motherhood.
Women, more highly educated people, and in some cases, younger people, were more likely to be accepting of voluntary childlessness – potentially because of a heightened awareness of the physical, emotional, psychological and career costs of bearing children.
While employment status was not associated with any trends in proscriptive attitudes, from a prescriptive viewpoint, retirees were relatively more disapproving of people choosing not to have children – perhaps again reflecting generational differences. Interestingly, the religiosity of countries showed no trends for either category – although at the individual level, people who were more religious were less accepting of both dimensions of voluntary childlessness.
These findings suggest that distinguishing between prescriptive and proscriptive attitudes on voluntary childlessness can more precisely capture people’s viewpoints. This study could therefore help shape ongoing research into how such attitudes may change over time, in Europe and elsewhere.
The authors add: “Our study finds that lower gender inequality predicts higher acceptance of voluntary childlessness, while the level of religiosity does not make any differences.”
Journal Reference:
- Szalma I, Heers M, Tanturri ML (2025) Measuring attitudes towards voluntary childlessness: Indicators in European comparative surveys. PLoS ONE 20(3): e0319081. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0319081
