Netherlands residents having children later, two on average

Women in the Netherlands are, on average, 30.3 years old when they have their first child, compared to 24.3 years in the early 1970s. Big families are also becoming less and less common in the country, with most families sticking to two children, Statistics Netherlands reported in the run-up to Mother’s Day on Sunday.

Nearly 5 million women will get coffee in bed or a hand-made macaroni necklace this Mother's Day. 78,000 mothers will celebrate Mother's Day for the first time.

A lot has changed in family composition in the Netherlands compared to 50 years ago. Since the 1960s and 1970s, more women attended higher education and entered the labor market. The introduction of the pill also made it possible to plan to have children, and having children young became less and less common. By 1995, women became mothers in their late twenties.

That also means that there are fewer young mothers in the Netherlands. At the start of 1995, a third of women aged 25 to 30 had children. This year, that was just over 20 percent.

Large families are also becoming increasingly rare. Fifty years ago, about 30 percent of mothers had four or more children. Now it’s less than 10 percent. Only one percent of mothers have six or more children. Most mothers, around half, have two children. About twenty percent have three, and another 20 percent have one.

A relatively large number of mothers with four or more children live in the Bible Belt, the strip of very Christian towns that runs from Zeeland to Oveijssel. Large families are least common in the south of the country.