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Europe’s demographic winter does not manifest itself only in statistics. Before turning into fewer births, empty schools, labour shortages and social security systems under pressure, it takes shape in the everyday choices of millions of young people: whether or not to leave their parents’ home, build a stable relationship, get married, have children.
It is from this awareness that the panel Scrolling Past Parenthood? How Social Media and AI Are Rewriting Family Life, organised in Dubrovnik as part of the III European Congress on the Family, entitled Putting an End to Europe’s Demographic Winter, was born. The congress, held from 11 to 13 September, brought together political representatives and experts to discuss not only birth rates, but also the cultural and technological transformations that are redefining the very idea of the family.
The starting point is alarming. In 2024, 3.55 million children were born in the European Union and the fertility rate fell to a historic low of 1.34 children per woman, well below the replacement level of around 2.1. In the same year, the average age of women at the birth of their first child reached 29.9 years, rising to 31.9 in Italy.
This is therefore not a temporary phenomenon. The European Commission estimates that the Union’s population could fall from the current 450.6 million to around 398.8 million by 2100, while by 2050 almost one in three Europeans could be aged 65 or over.
Attention, the family’s first resource
In his speech, Jürgen Joost, president of the German movement Wir Bürger, identified the real battleground: human attention. Technology is not necessarily an enemy of the family. It becomes dangerous, however, when it replaces what must remain personal: concrete relationships, parental judgement and moral responsibility.
Artificial intelligence can help translate a text, explain an exercise or organise commitments. It can even suggest a bedtime story. It cannot, however, replace the mother or father who reads it, the familiar voice that reassures the child, or the presence that turns a story into a memory.
A child needs not only accurate information. A child needs time, affection, boundaries, guidance and example. No algorithm can fully take on these tasks, because educating does not simply mean transmitting content: it means forming a person through a relationship founded on love and responsibility.
This also leads to a necessary self-criticism on the part of adults. It is inconsistent to reprimand children because they use their phones too much while parents constantly check notifications and messages during dinner. Educational authority does not derive from surveillance, but first and foremost from consistency. Children learn more easily from what they see being done than from what they hear being preached.
Life turned into a showcase
Social media do not simply show reality: they select it and stage it. Professional success, travel, beauty, consumption, independence and personal fulfilment are presented as indispensable components of a successful life. Everyday family life, with its sacrifices and responsibilities, appears less spectacular and therefore less visible.
The consequence is not necessarily an explicit rejection of the family. More often, it produces continuous postponement: first studies, then work, financial stability, a home, travel and self-realisation. The child is placed at the end of an ever-longer list of conditions to be met. But life rarely offers the perfect moment and postponement, as the years go by, can turn into involuntary renunciation.
Individual freedom is a value to be defended. It should not, however, be reduced to the absence of constraints. The family shows a higher conception of freedom: the ability to commit oneself, keep a promise and assume responsibility for another person. Marriage and parenthood do not erase the individual, but call upon them to move beyond self-referentiality and to think in terms of generations.
Educating for reality
Adela Mirza, president of Alternativa Dreapta and mother of two daughters, formulated an essential principle: do not allow children to replace real life with virtual life. Reality has no filters, offers no immediate gratification and does not allow us to eliminate with a single gesture whatever causes discomfort.
Precisely for this reason, it is irreplaceable. It is in concrete life that a child learns to wait, face disappointment, recognise emotions and respect the needs of others. The digital environment, designed to keep the user engaged and reward them quickly, can instead encourage impatience, fragmented attention and the constant search for approval.
The answer cannot simply be prohibition. What is needed are rules proportionate to age, spaces at home without phones and genuine knowledge of the content children are exposed to. But above all, positive alternatives are needed: books, handwriting, sport, volunteering, prayer, community life and family conversations uninterrupted by screens.
The decisive question, in fact, is not only how much time a young person spends online, but who is shaping their imagination. If the family gives up transmitting a vision of what is good, other actors will fill that space: influencers, commercial platforms and automated systems designed not to educate, but to maximise engagement.
Technology does not explain everything
It would nevertheless be simplistic to attribute declining birth rates to TikTok, Instagram or ChatGPT. As Joost pointed out, family decisions also depend on housing costs, job insecurity, taxation and the difficulty of reconciling employment and childcare.
A genuinely family-friendly policy must make parenthood economically possible and socially recognised. This means supporting family income, easing the tax burden in relation to the number of children, facilitating access to housing, protecting motherhood, recognising care work and allowing parents to spend more time with their children. Support should not replace the family with bureaucratic structures, but strengthen its autonomy.
Economic measures alone, however, are not enough. If a culture presents children primarily as a cost, an obstacle to a career or a limitation on freedom, even the most generous policies will have limited effects. Material security must be accompanied by renewed confidence in the future and in the value of transmission between generations.
Putting the person back at the centre
Social media and artificial intelligence can be useful tools, but they are not neutral: they embody economic models, priorities and ideas about human beings. For this reason, families, schools and institutions must demand transparency from algorithms, effective protection for minors and genuinely accessible tools of parental control.
The challenge is not to stop innovation, but to preserve human control over it. AI must assist responsibility, not replace it; social media must connect people, not isolate them; technology must have a place in the home without becoming the centre of the home.
Europe’s demographic winter will not end thanks to an application. It can only be overcome by rebuilding a culture in which starting a family is once again perceived as a good, having children as an act of hope, and caring for others as a full expression of freedom. Europe’s future will also depend on its ability to switch off the screens, look one another in the eyes again and choose to pass on life.