Eurostat: only one in four Greek families have children

Eurostat’s sad conclusion about the problem of low fertility in countries EU sounds alarming for Greece on World Children’s Day.

Undoubtedly, factors such as galloping inflation, low wages, job uncertainty and insufficient support for households whose income dries up before the end of the month are some of the reasons for the country’s demographic problem, which is getting worse and worse.

According to Eurostat, out of approximately 4.1 million households in Greece, more than 3 million do not have children. At the same time, less than 580,000 have only one child, and 400,000 households have two children registered. And only fewer than 170,000 households have three or more children.

As Eurostat recorded, in 2022 there were 200 million households in the EU, of which only 24.3% had children. Of these, 10% had either 1 child (12.1%) or 2 children (9.3%), while only 3.0% of EU households had 3 or more children.

Between 2012 and 2022, the total number of households in the EU increased by 6.9%. In fact, the percentage of people having at least one child decreased by 2.4. The highest percentage of households with children was in Slovakia (33.9%), Ireland (32.2%) and Cyprus (30.6%). At the same time, the lowest percentage was recorded in Finland (18.4%), Germany (20.1%) and the Netherlands (21.8%).

Households with one child are the most common option in all EU countries. More than half of households with children were “one-child families”: in Portugal, Bulgaria, Romania, Malta, Lithuania, Latvia, Italy, Spain and Hungary. Households with three or more children were the least common across all EU countriestheir share among all households with children was:

• 22.3% in Ireland,
• 21.2% in Sweden,
• 19% in Finland,
• 6.3% in Portugal,
• 6.5% in Bulgaria,
• 7.4% in Italy.

The disappointing data published by Eurostat should raise concerns in the political system, which must immediately confront this phenomenon and include a “repopulation” program among national priorities.

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