On Mother’s Day in Poland (May 26), data was published on what the average mother looks like today. She is a married woman with a higher education from a city, but behind this image lie significant changes: women are giving birth later, the number of children is decreasing, and almost one in three children is born out of wedlock.
In 2025, the average age of a woman at the birth of her child in Poland exceeded 31 years, which is about five years older than 25 years ago. At the same time, the age range remains very wide: the youngest mother was only 13 years old, while the oldest was 54 years old. Most often, couples decide to have a second child about two years after the birth of the first.
Despite these changes, Poland still ranks about mid-way in the European ranking for maternal age. For comparison, in Bulgaria, women give birth on average just after 28 years, while in Ireland, it is almost 33 years.
When talking about the typical portrait of a Polish mother, she is most often a married woman with a higher education living in a city, especially in the Mazowieckie Voivodeship. She usually gives birth to her first child in the first year of marriage.
Over the past decades, the demographics have changed dramatically. In 1980, nearly 700,000 children were born in Poland each year, while in 2025, that number dropped to about 238,000. This is a decrease of almost two-thirds over 40 years. At the same time, family models have also changed: while in 1980, 4.8% of children were born out of wedlock, by 2000, this figure had risen to 12.1%, and in 2025, it reached 28.4%. Today, almost one in three children is born outside of official marriage.
It is also interesting to note how births are distributed over time: children are most often born on Tuesdays in July. The average weight of a newborn is about 3.5 kilograms, and pregnancy usually lasts 39 weeks. In 2025, there were about 37 recorded cases of triplets and nearly 3,000 twins. The smallest newborn weighed about 350 grams, while the largest weighed almost 6 kilograms.
All of this shows how much motherhood in Poland has changed over the past decades: women are giving birth later, families are becoming more diverse, and the very model of parenting is gradually changing along with society.
