Many Japanese Teens Giving Up on Getting Married and Having Children

Japan is one of the countries in the world where population decline and aging are progressing most rapidly. The latest installment of an ongoing survey project of the Nippon Foundation asked teenagers aged 17 to 19 about life goals, such as marriage and raising children. The survey was conducted from late November to early December 2025, and is compared here to a survey on the same topic conducted in December 2022.

The proportion of respondents who either definitely or probably want to get married decreased by 7.4 percentage points, compared to the previous survey, for an overall level of 58.1%. When the respondents were subdivided into four categories according to their socioeconomic status, from 0 to 3 points (with greater affluence indicated by a higher score), those in the 0 category were below 50% in terms of intention to marry, at 49.2%, which was significantly lower than those in the other categories.

In terms of whether they think they will actually get married someday, as opposed to their personal preferences at the moment, the overall level fell by 6.2 percentage points to 44.8%. By socioeconomic status, the relatively affluent respondents in category 3 or 2 were in the 52% range with regard to the likelihood of getting married, as compared to 46.5% for those in category 1 and 37.5% for those in category 0. These results indicate that a household’s financial situation is strongly linked to how realistic the prospect of marriage seems.

The proportion of respondents who said they want to have children in the future (either definitely or probably) also declined by 7.1 percentage points overall, to 51.5%. Despite the government rolling out a wide range of measures to address the declining birthrate, the younger generation has not received sufficient incentive to have children. As with attitudes toward marriage, respondents with lower socioeconomic status are less inclined to want to have children.

The proportion of respondents who think they will actually have children (either definitely or probably) fell by 6.7 percentage points compared to previous survey, to an overall level of 38.9%. The breakdown by socioeconomic status shows that the percentage was 51.4% for category 3, 40.4% for category 2, 40.0% for category 1, and 33.4% for category 0. In addition, among those in category 0, 41.5% said that they either did not know or had never thought about it, suggesting that the idea of having children seems extremely unrealistic to them.

Data Sources

• Survey of teenagers about life plans (Japanese) by the Nippon Foundation.

(Translated from Japanese. Banner photo © PhotoAC.)