September 02, 2026 | News
Worried About the Environment, but Still Becoming Parents
Decades of German data suggest that strong environmental concerns generally did not delay or deter parenthood, while such worries tended to fade with age among parents and non-parents alike. Whether today’s youngest generations, growing up with climate change as a constant reality, will follow the same pattern remains an open question
Environmental worries don’t necessarily stand in the way of parenthood. © iStock / NewSaetiew
Younger generations grow up with climate change as a recurring headline, and many express reservations about having children because of what the future may bring. But environmental worries are not new. Previous generations came of age amid concerns about forest dieback and the Chernobyl disaster. Did such concerns ultimately lead people to have fewer children or postpone parenthood? A study co-authored by Steffen Peters and published in “Population and Environment” found little evidence that strong environmental concern when young was generally associated with whether or when people in Germany became parents.
Tracking worries over the long term
“Most studies examining the association between climate change-related concerns and fertility look at relatively short time periods, while we investigated this over the long run using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP),” says Peters. The SOEP surveys around 14,000 households each year and is regularly refreshed as Germany’s population changes, for example through migration. For their long-term analysis, the researchers narrowed the sample to people born between the mid-1960s and early 1980s whom they could observe from age 20 or younger into adulthood, in some cases up to age 40. They compared people reporting strong environmental concerns with those reporting lower levels of concern. Since 1984, the SOEP has asked participants whether they are “very concerned,” “somewhat concerned,” or “not concerned at all” about protecting the environment.
“The measure is rather general. We can’t know what exactly respondents worried about. One person might be thinking about air quality or the condition of green spaces where they live, another about broader environmental issues,” cautions Peters. But because the same people answered the question repeatedly over many years, the researchers could trace how their concerns changed as they aged rather than relying on a one-off response.
Little evidence of delayed or deterred parenthood
The results differed from the scientists’ initial expectations. People who reported strong environmental concerns between the ages of 16 and 23 were not generally less likely to become parents, and such concerns were not associated with becoming parents earlier or later. And there was another unanticipated finding. “We expected parenthood to increase environmental concern, as having children may make people more aware of the environmental problems their children could face in the future. But our analyses found little evidence that parents were more concerned than non-parents,” summarizes Peters. In both groups, concern about the environment tended to fade with age.
Will today’s youth follow the same pattern?
The next question is what today’s young people will decide when it comes to starting a family. For them, climate change has been a much more persistent presence. A recent survey by the German Environment Agency found that 69% of 14- to 22-year-olds in Germany were pessimistic about the future of the environment and climate. It is still too early to know whether this outlook will translate into family decisions that differ from those of earlier generations. Although the study found no general link between strong environmental concern in youth and later parenthood, one older generation did stand out: among people born before 1970, whose adulthood coincided with rising ecological awareness in Germany, those most concerned about the environment were slower to become parents. No comparable pattern emerged in later groups. Whether younger generations today will show a distinct pattern of their own remains to be seen.
Each dot shows the estimated likelihood of having become a parent by age 40; the vertical lines indicate the uncertainty around that estimate. Women were more likely than men to be parents by 40, but for both women and men, strong environmental concern in youth made no statistically significant difference. © MPIDR
Original Publication
Peters, S.; Striessnig, E.; Trimarchi, A.; Testa, M.R.; Nitsche, N.:
Population and Environment 47:3, 1–29. (2025)
