Over the past few months, my generation has once again been blamed for something that’s not our fault. Granted, we Gen Zs are annoying in many respects — we’re constantly either glued to our screens or searching for our vapes, we hate hard work and we’re sinking the night-time economy by being too boring. And yes, I don’t like answering the phone if I don’t know who’s calling me. I’ll hold my hands up to that. But one thing we’re not about to take responsibility for? The falling birthrate.
The stats would have you believe that we are to blame. A study carried out by the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies found that only one in 10 people from Gen Z (which usually refers to those born between 1997 and 2012) had had a child by the age of 23, compared with one in four millennials at a similar age. This exacerbated fears about the already declining fertility rate, which the Office for National Statistics confirmed last week had fallen to a record low. These figures found that the total fertility rate in 2025 had reduced to 1.39 children per woman, down from 1.41 in 2024 — the lowest since data collection began in 1938.
