page_title: Generation Z
section_title: Europe
hierarchical_section_title: Generation Z / Demographics / Europe
context_page_description: Generation Z, or Gen Z for short, are the demographic cohort succeeding Millennials and preceding Generation Alpha. Researchers and popular media use the mid-to-late 1990s as starting birth years and the early 2010s as ending birth years. Most members of Generation Z are the children of Generation X and sometimes millennials.
  Most members of Generation Z have used digital technology since a young age and are comfortable with the Internet and social media, but are not necessarily digitally literate. Generation Z tends to be abstemious and risk-averse compared to millennials, and has a tendency to be more flexible in workplaces. However, even though it has lower rates of teenage pregnancies and alcohol and drug consumption compared to previous generations, the generation has also been characterized in the media as anxious and depressed. Some commentators attribute these effects to the generation having grown up in a time of social media, smartphones, the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing recession.
context_section_description: From about 1750 to 1950, Western Europe transitioned from having both high birth and death rates to having low birth and death rates. By the late 1960s or 1970s, the average woman had fewer than two children, and, although demographers at first expected a "correction," such a rebound never came. Despite a bump in the total fertility rates (TFR) of some European countries in the very late twentieth century (the 1980s and 1990s), especially France and Scandinavia, they never returned to replacement level; the bump was largely due to older women realizing their dreams of motherhood. At first, falling fertility is due to urbanization and decreased infant mortality rates, which diminished the benefits and increased the costs of raising children. In other words, it became more economically sensible to invest more in fewer children, as economist Gary Becker argued. (This is the first demographic transition.) Falling fertility then came from attitudinal shifts. By the 1960s, people began moving from traditional and communal values towards more expressive and individualistic outlooks due to access to and aspiration of higher education, and to the spread of lifestyle values once practiced only by a tiny minority of cultural elites. (This is the second demographic transition.) Although the momentous cultural changes of the 1960s had leveled off by the 1990s, the social and cultural environment of the very late twentieth-century was quite different from that of the 1950s. Such changes in values have had a major effect on fertility that cemented itself in subsequent demographic cohorts. Member states of the European Community saw a steady increase in not just divorce and out-of-wedlock births between 1960 and 1985 but also falling fertility rates. In 1981, a survey of countries across the industrialized world found that while more than half of people aged 65 and over thought that women needed children to be fulfilled, only 35% of those between the ages of 15 to 24 (younger Baby Boomers and older Generation X) agreed.
  By the early 2000s, the average reported ideal family size among German-speaking countries has fallen to 1.7, well below the replacement level. Low levels of interest in reproduction is more pronounced among the economically advantaged, in contrast to earlier times, when wealth was correlated with fertility. At the same time, France and Scandinavia retained high fertility rates compared to other developed countries, especially Southern Europe and East Asia. At first sight, it appears that this might be due to their socially progressive values and policies, i.e. making it easier for women to pursue both their careers and reproductive dreams. However, closer scrutiny suggests the argument that "feminism is the new pro-natalism" is untenable, given that there are socially progressive countries with low fertility rates such as Austria and Canada on one hand, and more conservative and traditionalist countries with high fertility rates such as Ireland and the United States on the other.
  At the start of the twenty-first century, Europe has a population aging at an unprecedented rate. It is estimated that by 2050, 40% of Europeans will be over the age of 60. This problem is especially acute in the East whereas in the West, it is alleviated by international immigration. In addition, an increasing number of children born in Europe has been to non-European parents. Because children of immigrants in Europe tend to be about as religious as they are, this could slow the decline of religion (or the growth of secularism) in the continent as the twenty-first century progresses. In the United Kingdom, the number of foreign-born residents stood at 6% of the population in 1991. Immigration subsequently surged and has not fallen since (as of 2018). Researches by the demographers and political scientists Eric Kaufmann, Roger Eatwell, and Matthew Goodwin suggest that such a fast ethno-demographic change is one of the key reasons behind public backlash in the form of nationalist populist revolts against the political establishment across the ri
caption: European countries by proportions of people aged 65 and over between 2008 and 2018