NewsWire: 1/31/22
- A growing share of childless Americans expect that they won’t ever have kids. The most popular reason is that they simply don’t want them. (Pew Research Center)
- NH: In the past, we’ve taken the position that declining birthrates are not primarily driven by Americans being less likely to want kids, but because they feel less able to have kids for various reasons. But this Pew survey, which asks people what they think about having children, concludes otherwise.
- Fully 44% of childless adults ages 18 to 49 say it is “not too likely” or “not at all likely" that they will have children someday. This has risen from 37% in 2018.
- When asked why, the majority of this group say it’s because they just don’t want to have kids (56%). Other, less common reasons include medical reasons (19%), financial reasons (17%), lack of a partner (15%), and their age or their partner’s age (10%).
- Pew’s results seem very misaligned with recent behavioral trends and other surveys. I would not only say that the share of childless Americans who say they won’t ever have kids seems high, but the share who say it’s out of personal preference seems very high.
- Looking at current birthrate trends, it’s estimated that 25% of today’s young women may end up childless. (See “Yes, Falling Birthrates Are a Big Problem.”) That’s a far cry from 44%. (While the Pew poll surveyed men as well as women, the two groups were equally likely to say they will probably not have kids.) An earlier survey we reported on (see “How Do Americans Feel About Having Kids?”) put the share of childless adults who don’t want kids at only 12%.
- The number of children that Americans say they’d ideally like to have has also not changed since the 1980s and remains around 2.5. If more people really didn’t want to have kids, you’d expect the ideal family size to shrink. If anything, there is some evidence that the share of Americans who want three or more children, and four or more, has been growing.
- IMO, the unusually high 44% response—and the 7 percentage-point jump since 2018—is a temporary response to the pandemic. It’s not surprising that people aren’t optimistic about having kids right now. As I pointed out in 2020 (see “The Baby Bust of 2020”), about a third of women told the Guttmacher Institute that because of the pandemic, they wanted to delay having children or have fewer of them.
- This brings us to the next result: the high share of people who say they’re unlikely to have kids because they simply don’t want them (and presumably will never want them). Other reasons trail far behind. This clashes with virtually every other recent survey on this issue, which show that the reasons non-parents don’t want children are about equally divided between personal preference and economic or other limiting factors. (See “Do Falling Birthrates Reflect Changing Priorities?”)
- In a Morning Consult survey from last fall, childless Millennials were most likely to cite “the expense of having children” as the reason they did not have kids. Not having found a partner came second. And in a 2018 poll by Morning Consult and The New York Times, which surveyed 20- to 45-year-olds, the top two reasons given for not having kids were “want leisure time” and “haven’t found partner,” which was followed closely by “can’t afford childcare,” “no desire for children,” and “can’t afford a house.”
- There’s another problem inherent to these kinds of questions. If you ask young people whether they’re likely to have kids when they’re not in the phase of life when they’ve actually thought about it, you might not get the same answer several years later. Attitudes about having kids are arguably the most accurate only after women have completed their childbearing years. In the US, the average age of mothers at first birth is now 27. For many Millennials, kids aren’t on their radar until they’re in their mid-20s.
- In the Morning Consult/NYT poll, for instance, several of the top answers from young people who didn’t want children indicate that people tend to answer these questions in a way that reflects their life right now: “still in school,” “haven’t found partner,” “career is a greater priority,” etc. Only a few of the answers reflect attitudes or circumstances with little chance of changing.
- Bottom line: I think we can trust people to answer accurately a question about whether they could see themselves having a child right now. But people have a harder time articulating why, and as circumstances change, their reasons can change, too. It’s a constantly moving target. The only thing people know is if having kids just seems likely or not at the moment.
- That’s why I’m more inclined to rely on survey data that show how attitudes about having children have changed over time. And here, the evidence is stark.
- Take a look at the graph below, compiled by the Virginia demography forecasting group Demographic Intelligence. It offers of world of insight. The red and black lines, total and completed fertility rates (respectively), track fertility behavior. Note (as we might expect) that the black line varies less than the red line. This means that some of the variation in current fertility behavior reflects timing shifts over a woman's lifetime. If a woman has fewer children early in life, she tends to have more later, and vice versa.
- The baby bust of the late 1930s, for example, was partly the result of parents delaying births until later in life. The baby boom of the 1950s was both the result of some older women delaying their births until after World War II was over and some younger women having their births at very young ages. In the 1970s, Boomer women again started delaying their births. And so on.
- This leads to our first interesting observation. The completed fertility of women (the black line), which we only learn once a cohort of women reaches age 45, really hasn't varied much for women born from 1948 through 1978--that is, through most of the Boom and X generations.
- OK, now take a look at the thinner lines. These surveys track various measures of ideal family size. They consistently seem to lie about 0.5 children above the completed fertility line of each cohort at age 25. Over the last two or three decades, far from falling, measures of how many children Americans consider "ideal" seems to have risen a bit.
- More importantly, this ideal family size comes closer to current fertility behavior when the economy is doing really well--early 1950s, most of the 1960s, and late 1980s and 1990s. Contrariwise, it veers furthest apart when the economy is doing poorly--the mid-1930s, the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the last 15 years. Post-GFC, indeed, the gap between the two lines has widened to nearly 1.0 child. This is the largest gap ever measured, with the only possible exception being the mid-1930s when (in 1935) George Gallup asked the very first ideal family size question.
- To sum up: The ideal family size has remained the same over the last 15 years, but the birthrate continues to fall. We're not sure exactly why. But the historical evidence strongly suggests the powerful explanatory role of external constraints. Today, in addition to disappointing economic well-being, such constraints may also include the pandemic, inability to find a good partner, and radical uncertainty about our country's longer-term prospects.
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