Eight out of ten young adults in Denmark want to become parents, yet the country's actual birth rate remains well below their aspirations, a large-scale study of 20,000 women and 11,000 men aged 20 to 28 has found.
The EU-funded BIOSFER research project, led by Professor Cecilia Ramlau-Hansen, found that women want an average of 2.46 children and men 2.43, with both sexes hoping to have their first child between the ages of 27 and 28. The findings draw on participants from the national birth cohort Better Health Across Generations, born between 1996 and 2003.
In practice, Danish women had an average of just 1.5 children in 2025, and the mean age at first birth stood at 30.4 years for women and 31.9 for men — several years later than young adults envision, pointing to a persistent gap between family ambitions and outcomes.