A new study breaks down the reasons more U.S. adults say they are unlikely to have children.

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Like Ms. McKay, a growing number of U.S. adults say they are unlikely to raise children, according to a study released on Thursday by the Pew Research Center. When the survey was conducted in 2023, 47 percent of those younger than 50 without children said they were unlikely ever to have children, an increase of 10 percentage points since 2018.

When asked why kids were not in their future, 57 percent said they simply didn’t want to have them. Women were more likely to respond this way than men (64 percent vs. 50 percent). Further reasons included the desire to focus on other things, like their career or interests; concerns about the state of the world; worries about the costs involved in raising a child; concerns about the environment, including climate change; and not having found the right partner.

  • talEnglish
    251·
    4 months ago

    Having fewer children is something that is positively-correlated with a society being wealthy, rather than the other way around.

    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertility-rate-vs-level-of-prosperity

    The phenomenon of societies having their birth rate fall off as they become wealthier is called the demographic transition.

    And further, that correlation exists across a number of axes:

    • Time (that is, as societies have become wealthier, the number of children they have has dropped).

    • Space (poorer societies today tend to have more children than wealthier societies do).

    • Within a society. Poorer people in society tend to have more children. Here’s the US, and more-generally:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

      Income and fertility is the association between monetary gain on one hand, and the tendency to produce offspring on the other. There is generally an inverse correlation between income and the total fertility rate within and between nations.[3][4] The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born in any developed country.

    • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
      9·
      4 months ago

      Within a society. Poorer people in society tend to have more children.

      That’s why the very wealthy want people to keep having lots of kids. Kids make you more willing to take shit in order to feed them and make you poorer and more dependent on your job. That’s not a bad thing about kids, it’s a good thing about parents, but it also makes parents easier to exploit.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      135·
      4 months ago

      Having fewer children is something that is positively-correlated with a society being wealthy, rather than the other way around.

      Correlation is not causation, there’s no “other way around”…

      But what you’re talking about is the drop in fertility due to industrialization and other periods where children worked less and cost more.

      That’s different than what I’m talking about; when a labor supply shrinks it means workers get paid more.

      That’s just basic supply and demand.

      We’re both right, just talking about different things.

      • phcorcoran@lemmy.world
        5·
        4 months ago

        I took “rather than the other way around” to mean “rather than negatively-correlated” in this context, since positively was emphasized