Guardian readers have fewer children

I sometimes hear people lament that young people are reluctant to have children because they don’t want them to deal with a world that gets destroyed by climate change. But is this really a trend?

There clearly is a trend that younger people get married later, have children later and have fewer children. But I am pretty sure that lower sperm count in young men is not the reason for this trend. Rather, it is more likely the fact that younger people are financially less secure, thus have to live longer at home and take longer to have the economic means to start a family, particularly in countries where child care is increasingly expensive.

But are worries about climate change also to blame for low birth rates? Strangely, a group of researchers in Poland looked at British people and the determinants of having a first child.

The good news is that most factors they tested didn’t matter. Only the obvious ones did. Age and marital status are the only factors that have a large influence on the probability of having a first child. Nobody will be surprised to learn that – up to a certain point – people are more likely to have a child if they are a little older, and people are much more likely to have a child if they are married or live with a partner. Meanwhile, educational attainment or political orientation did not influence the decision to have children.

The only other factor they found that had a small effect on first births is concern about the environment, but only under certain constraints. People who profess to be more concerned about the environment and climate change are not, per se, less likely to have children. Similarly, people who get a lot of news about climate change in their news feed are no less likely to have children.

But people who are very concerned about climate change and get a lot of exposure to news about it are about 62% less likely to have a first child than people who are concerned about the environment but don’t get trapped in a doom loop of climate news.

And in the UK, it seems these people are Guardian readers. The charts below show the number of news stories on climate change in the left-leaning Guardian newspaper and the right-leaning Sun tabloid.

Number of news articles on climate change in the Guardian (left) and the Sun (right)

Source: Weychert et al. (2026)