New figures about births and marriages in the country suggest that people are waiting longer to have children and fewer people are getting married first.

The Federal Statistics Office says women are waiting longer before having their first child. The number of babies born to under-25s has fallen by 16 percent since 2001. In the same period, the number of children born to over-35s doubled.

For the first time, the average number of children a woman has has gone down slightly. Among Swiss women, the average is 1.4 kids. Among the country’s immigrant population, the figure is 1.8.

More and more children are born to parents who are not married: that number has practically doubled in ten years.

However at 19 percent of all births outside marriage, Switzerland is still well behind the European average of 37 percent.