The number of childless Americans is growing, and research suggests the trend won’t slow down.
Nearly 45 percent of women aged 15 to 49 did not have children between 2017 and 2019, according to data from theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), up from around 42 percent between 2015 and 2017.
Although older CDC data is less directly comparable, as the range of ages included has changed, it suggests that the rate of childlessness has been rising for even longer: In 2002, about 40 percent of women and girls aged 15 to 44 did not have children.
And the percentage of Americans who do not have children will likely continue to rise, research shows, because more and more adults are actively choosing not to procreate or being prevented from doing so by fertility, financial or partnership issues.
A recent survey from the Pew Research Center shows that 47 percent of adults under 50 without children say it is unlikely they will ever have them – an increase of 10 percentage points from 2018.
In part, this appears to be because an increasing number of adults simply don’t want to be parents. About 57% of younger adults in the Pew survey said one of the main reasons they will probably never have children is that they “just don’t want to,” compared with about 31% of childless adults over age 50.
But for most adults in the US, Alison Gemmill said The Hill, not having children is the result of circumstances, not choice.
The top reason adults ages 50 and older gave Pew researchers for not having children was that “it never happened.”
The specific reasons vary. Fertility problems, for example, will always prevent a part of the adult population who want to have children from having them. But for many people, other things get in the way, sociologists told The Hill.
“I think life happens and there are a lot of competing things and a lot of restrictions, and that’s how people end up without kids,” Gemmill said.
More than a third of childless adults over the age of 50 who participated in the Pew survey said that one of the main reasons they didn’t have children was because they never found the right partner to have them, a factor that was also cited by almost a quarter of those interviewed. younger adults.
The number of American adults who are unpartnered is increasing. About 4 in 10 American adults ages 25 to 54 were neither married nor living with a significant other in 2019, an increase of nearly 10 percentage points from 1990, according to Bank search.
This may be because the process of finding a partner seems to have become more difficult: 2020 Pew Survey found that about half of American adults believe dating has become more difficult in the last 10 years.
For many Americans, remaining childless is a matter of priorities. Some adults don’t have children because they put career, education, leisure or other activities before starting a family during their reproductive years, Gemmill told The Hill.
In Pew’s July survey, about 20 percent of adults ages 50 and older who have never had children said one of the main reasons they hadn’t was that they “wanted to focus on other things.” More than twice as many adults under 50 who said it was unlikely they would ever have children – 44% – said the same.
Giving birth and raising children has also become more expensive, which may be contributing to why some people who want children don’t have them or why others choose not to have children, according to Sarah Hayford, a professor of sociology at Ohio State University.
About 12 percent of childless adults over age 50 in the July Pew survey and 36 percent of those under age 50 said one of the reasons they don’t have children is that they can’t afford to raise a child.
A 2018 survey of The New York Times suggests that the cost of raising children plays an even larger role in people’s decisions to delay having children, or not to have children at all.
The study found that 64 percent of adults ages 20 to 45 point to the cost of child care as the reason they have fewer children than they consider ideal.
The cost of childbirth alone has tripled since 1996 – increasing the threat of medical debt for young mothers.
The national average cost for a vaginal birth for someone receiving care in their U.S. health insurance network is now nearly $14,000, according to FAIR Health’s Birth Cost Tracker.
The average price for an in-network C-section is even more expensive: about $17,000.
And the cost of raising children — including transportation, food and child care — has skyrocketed in recent years, growing nearly 20% between 2016 and 2021, according to one study. LendingTree Study.
It now costs about $22,000 a year to raise a young child in the U.S., according to the LendingTree study published last year.
Both the financial burden of raising children and the difficulties of finding a partner have for years influenced whether people have children, Gemmill and Hayford said.
But they said a more recent issue – social pessimism – is stopping people from having children.
Fears about the future of climate change, global conflict and even the possibility of another pandemic are leading some Americans to choose not to have children, Gemmill said.
New York Times research found that 33% of adults have fewer children because they are concerned about the impact of climate change.
And this concern seems particularly impactful among younger adults: The July Pew survey found that adults under age 50 are most likely to say that fear about the future is the main reason they don’t have — and likely won’t will have – children.
Among older adults without children, 13 percent cited concerns about the state of the world as the reason they did not have children, and 6 percent cited concerns about the environment.
Meanwhile, 38 percent of adults ages 18 to 49 said concerns about the state of the world are a big reason they are unlikely to have children, and 26 percent said concerns about the environment they are.
“People are worried about the future in ways they maybe weren’t before,” Gemmill said.
Sociologists have stressed that while the rise in childlessness may be worrying for some people, the percentage of childless adults remains much lower in the US than in other wealthy nations.
Data from the Human Fertility Database shared with The Hill shows that the childlessness rate in Canada is about 80% higher than in the US, for example.
“I think this is something that gets lost in the conversation,” he said. Leslie Raizassistant research professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies fertility rates.
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