Why fewer Americans are having kids

The number of Americans without children is growing, and research suggests the trend is not going to slow down.

Nearly 45 percent of women aged 15 to 49 were childless between 2017 and 2019, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), up from about 42 percent between 2015 and 2017.  

While older CDC data is less directly comparable, as the range of included ages has shifted, it suggests the rate of childlessness has been creeping up for longer still: In 2002, about 40 percent of women and girls aged 15 to 44 did not have children. 

And the share of Americans who have no kids will likely keep getting bigger, research shows, because more adults are actively choosing not to procreate or being prevented from doing so by issues related to fertility, finances or partnership.  

A recent Pew Research Center survey shows that 47 percent of adults under 50 without children say they are unlikely to ever have them — a 10-percentage point increase from 2018.    

In part, that appears to be because an increasing number of adults simply don’t want to become parents. About 57 percent of those younger adults in the Pew survey said a major reason they will likely never have kids is that they “just don’t want to,” compared to about 31 percent of childless adults over 50.   

But for most adults in the U.S., Alison Gemmill told The Hill, being childless is the result of circumstance, not choice.  

The top reason adults 50 and older gave Pew researchers for not having kids was that “it just never happened.”  

The particular reasons vary. Fertility issues, for one, will always prevent a portion of the adult population that wants 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 there’s a lot of constraints, and that’s how people end up childless,” said Gemmill.    

More than a third of childless adults over 50 who took part in the Pew survey said a major reason they did not have children was because they never found the right partner to have them with, a factor that was also pointed to by nearly a quarter of younger adults. 

The number of American adults who have no partner is on the rise. About 4 in 10 American adults between the ages of 25 and 54 were neither married nor living with a significant other in 2019, an increase of nearly 10 percentage points from 1990, according to Pew research.  

That could be because the process of finding a partner appears to have gotten harder: A 2020 Pew survey found that about half of American adults believe dating has gotten more difficult in the past 10 years.   

For a number of Americans, remaining childless is a matter of priorities. Some adults don’t have kids because they put their career, getting an education, leisure or other pursuits ahead of starting a family during their reproductive years, Gemmill told The Hill.    

In the July Pew survey, about 20 percent of adults 50 and older who never had children said one of the main reasons they didn’t was that they “wanted to focus on other things.” More than twice as many under-50 adults who said they were unlikely to ever have children — 44 percent — said the same. 

Giving birth to and raising children has also gotten more expensive, which may be contributing to why some people who want children are not having them or why others are opting to go childless, according to Sarah Hayford, a sociology professor at the Ohio State University.    

About 12 percent of childless adults over 50 in the July Pew survey and 36 percent of those under 50 said one reason they don’t have kids is that they can’t afford to raise a child.  

A 2018 survey from The New York Times suggests the cost of raising children plays an even bigger role in people’s decision to delay having children, or not have any altogether.    

The study found that 64 percent of adults between 20 and 45 point to the cost of child care as the reason they are having fewer children than they think is ideal.   

The cost of childbirth alone has tripled since 1996 — raising the threat of medical debt for young mothers. 

The national median charge for a vaginal delivery for someone receiving care in their health insurance network in the U.S. is now nearly $14,000, according to the FAIR Health’s Cost of Giving Birth Tracker.  

The median price for an in-network C-section is even pricier: about $17,000.   

And the cost of raising children — including transportation, food and child care — has skyrocketed in recent years, growing by nearly 20 percent between 2016 and 2021, according to a LendingTree study.  

It now costs about $22,000 a year to raise a small child in the U.S., according to the LendingTree study, which was published last year.  

Both the financial burden of raising children and difficulties finding a partner have influenced whether or not people have children for years, Gemmill and Hayford said.   

But they said a newer issue — societal pessimism — is turning people off from having kids.  

Fear over the future of climate change, global conflicts and even the possibility of another pandemic is leading some Americans to choose not to have children, Gemmill said.   

The New York Times survey found that 33 percent of adults are having fewer children because they are worried about the impact of climate change.    

And this concern appears particularly impactful among younger adults: The July Pew survey found that adults under 50 are more likely to say that fear over the future is a primary reason they don’t — and likely won’t — have children.    

Among older childless adults, 13 percent cited concerns about the state of the world as a reason they did not have children, and 6 percent pointed to concerns about the environment.   

Meanwhile, 38 percent of adults aged 18 to 49 said concerns about the state of the world are a big reason they’re unlikely to have children, and 26 percent said concerns about the environment are.    

“People are worried about the future in a way that maybe they weren’t before,” Gemmill said.    

Sociologists stressed that while the rise of childlessness can be concerning to some people, the portion of adults without children remains far smaller in the U.S. than in other wealthy nations.    

Data from the Human Fertility Database shared with The Hill shows the childlessness rate in Canada is about 80 percent higher than that in the U.S., for example.    

“I think that’s something that gets lost in the conversation,” said Leslie Root, an assistant research professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies fertility rates.