About one in four women born from the late 1990s to 2012 will remain childless if current trends continue. That stark figure is a projection from a new paper, Choice or Circumstance? Rising Childlessness in Ireland, from the Iona Institute (of which I am a patron). Gen Z, those now aged roughly between 14 and 30, are already dubbed the anxious generation. They have lived through a global pandemic, watched job security erode and seen the prospect of home ownership recede to levels far lower than that of their parents’ generation. It now looks as if a significant number of them are also facing childlessness, much of it involuntary. The paper projects outcomes in part by charting fertility trends in previous generations. Starting with women born in the late 1950s, the so-called baby boomers, only 13.5pc were still childless at age 45. At age 30, only 30.9 per cent were childless. For those born in the early 1990s, the number who were childless at 30 had doubled to 63.6pc. The rise in fertility treatment is an indicator that many women still want children, no matter how emotionally and physically challenging the process becomes Figures released by the CSO this week confirm that the total fertility rate, that is, the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime, has dropped dramatically from 1.9 in 2015, which was already below the replacement rate, to 1.5 in 2025. Yet a 2022 Amárach poll carried out for the Iona Institute showed that people still aspire to having two children, which suggests people are being blocked from achieving a cherished goal.The average age of a first-time mother rose from 30.7 years in 2015 to 31.8 years in 2025. [ Ireland must encourage larger families and higher migration as birth rates fall, report warnsOpens in new window ]From 2005 to 2025, to no one’s sorrow, teenage births have fallen from roughly 1 in 25 to just 1 in 100. However, the share of births to women over 40 has doubled from roughly 1 in 24 to 1 in 12. Becoming pregnant at older ages carries greater risks of miscarriage, complicated labour and medical interventions at birth. Those risks seem worth it to many women when the alternative is childlessness. The rise in fertility treatment is similarly an indicator that many women still want children, no matter how emotionally and physically challenging the process becomes or how poor IVF outcomes are at older ages.Before the 1930s, despite women having an average of 3.5 children, there was a 25 per cent childlessness rate, coupled with a historically low marriage rate and higher ages at the time of marriage. Extreme economic restriction was a significant factor in the high rates of childlessness pre-1930. Women’s lives have changed utterly and mostly for the better since then. It is somewhat eerie to see high rates of childlessness once again, along with lower and later marriage rates. But this time around, the number of children is far less than half what it was in the early decades of the 20th century.Committed relationships that might result in babies are far less likely if most of your time is spent relating to a deviceBirth rates are falling everywhere, causing people to reach for every possible explanation. As Mark O’Connell noted recently, John Burn-Murdoch, a Financial Times journalist famous for presenting complex information in graph form, has even posited that the recent birth dearth might stem in part from smartphone use. If we look at the decline in teen births, smartphones and video games are likely a factor. People are spending more time alone in their rooms. For slightly older age groups, according to the American Time Use Study, young people aged between 18 and 29 in 2010 spent more than 12 hours a week socialising in person with friends. By 2024, that had fallen to five hours a week. Committed relationships that might result in babies are far less likely if most of your time is spent relating to a device. And if you are living in your childhood bedroom in your 30s despite earning a wage that would have permitted your parents to buy a house, it’s no wonder you are not thinking about having babies.[ Declining birth rate means there will be fewer people of working age to support the growing number of pensionersOpens in new window ]We are left scrambling for costly solutions. A New York Times profile of the Italian Alto Adige-South Tyrol area described how parents receive “discounted nursery schools, baby products, groceries, healthcare, energy bills, transportation, after-school activities and summer camps”, along with an extra €200 a month on top of the average annual means-tested national child benefit of about €2,000. While the result is better than in the rest of Italy, where the birth rate fell to a truly scary 1.14 by 2025, the birth rate in Alto Adige is only 1.4, lower than the Irish rate of 1.5. Perhaps we could push it to 2.1 if we had the same incentives here.My view is that, aside from the disastrous housing crisis and changes in socialisation, older adults have done younger generations no favours by urging them to delay settling down until their 30s and to prioritise travel and self-fulfilment instead. While more attention is focused on the predictably awful economic impact of birth rate decline, already visible in South Korea and Japan where childcare facilities are being repurposed for eldercare, the human heartache caused by involuntary childlessness is incalculable.