Only children in Japan surged from 10% to 20% in the past 20 years: survey

OSAKA — The ratio of only children in Japan has been rising as the percentage of couples considered to have completed childbearing, with 15 to 19 years passed since marriage, who have one child was 19.7% in 2021, a national survey has revealed.

According to the Japanese National Fertility Survey conducted by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, from the 1980s to 2002, the percentage of only children remained at around 10%, but increased slightly to 11.7% in 2005. It then increased to 15.9% in 2010 and to 18.5% in 2015. This means a sharp increase from roughly 10% to nearly 20% over about 20 years.

By number of children per couple, two was the most common at 50.8%, followed by one (19.7%), three (18.6%), none (7.7%) and four or more (3.2%). In the past, the order used to be two, three, and one, but since 2015, the order has been two, one, and three. It is no longer the case for an only child to be relatively rare.

As the age of the woman upon her first marriage increases, the number of children actually born tends to be lower than the number planned at the time of marriage, suggesting that the rise in the percentage of only children is influenced by delayed marriages.

Natsuho Tomabechi, an associate professor at Osaka University of Economics who specializes in family sociology, pointed out, “The increase in the number of only children is not only due to late marriages. The period when the number of only children began to increase coincides with the ’employment ice age generation’ who entered the workforce in the 1990s and 2000s when the economy was in bad shape. Therefore, there may have been a situation where they decided that they had no choice but to have an only child for economic reasons.”

(Japanese original by Hirofumi Nohara, Osaka City News Department)