The Gender Gap Report Southeast Europe: Future Families - How Gender Shapes Views on Children, Marriage, and Life Goals

Across Southeast Europe, a generation is navigating profound tensions between personal ambition, economic uncertainty, and the biological and social pressures of family formation — all while their countries grapple with some of the sharpest demographic declines anywhere in the world. On the question of children, young men and women are strikingly aligned in how many they want. But beneath that consensus lie meaningful divergences: in timing, in life priorities, and in how much young people — especially young women — expect of themselves and their futures. Most striking of all is what has changed since 2018: not a shift toward career over family, but a broad retreat from ambition in every direction at once.

The latest installment of The Gender Gap Report, authored by Semir Dzebo and based on the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung's 2024 Southeast Europe Youth Study surveying nearly 9,000 young people aged 14–29 across twelve countries, offers a rare empirical window into how the next generation thinks about marriage, children, and life goals. How do young men and women differ in when — not just whether — they want to become parents? Why do young women express higher ambitions across career, education, and family simultaneously, rather than trading one for another? And what does the dramatic decline in life goal importance since 2018 reveal about the deeper roots of the region's demographic crisis?

This is the seventh issue in a ten-part series exploring the gender gap across multiple dimensions. In this analysis, Semir Dzebo examines family aspirations and life priorities, showing how young Southeast Europeans largely agree on the destination — a two-child family — while diverging on the timeline and the journey. Crucially, the data challenges the political narrative that low fertility reflects a generational turn away from family: young people are not choosing careers over children, but expressing lower optimism across all life domains at once. Understanding this distinction is essential for any policy response that hopes to do more than offer cash incentives into a vacuum of hope.