Study: 20% of adults do not want kids

Key takeaways

• 21.6% of adults who were surveyed said they do not plan on having children.
• A study co-author told Healio that primary care physicians should listen to patients’ requests for voluntary sterilization requests like vasectomies or tubal ligation.
• Most childfree adults decided they did not want children early in life.

More than one-fifth of adults in the United States do not want children, which is a higher prevalence than previously thought, according to researchers.

The study, published in Scientific Reports, found that most childfree adults — defined as those who do not plan on ever having children — decided they did not want children early in life, while in their teenage years and 20s.

The authors wrote that their findings suggest physicians’ hesitation to a childfree woman’s request for sterilization because of the fear that she will change her mind later “is misinformed and paternalistic.”

Study co-author Zachary Neal, MA, PhD, an associate professor in the psychology department at Michigan State University, told Healio that, in light of the data, primary care physicians should listen to patients’ requests for voluntary sterilization requests like vasectomies or tubal ligation.

“Our findings suggest that many people do not want to have children and that they often stick with their decision for many years. Therefore, while there may be medical reasons to advise against such procedures in certain cases, we believe it is inappropriate to advise against these procedures on the grounds that the patient may change their mind,” Neal said. “Thus, the take-home message is, when medically appropriate, to accommodate patients' requests for voluntary sterilization.”

Neal and colleagues analyzed data from a sample of 1,500 adults who participated in the MSU State of the State Survey. They used three questions to determine childfree people separately from other types of nonparents — an important distinction, according to Neal. He said in the release that this study is one of the first that specifically counts childfree adults.

When the researchers divided the survey participants into six mutually-exclusive reproductive statuses — ambivalent, undecided, childless, not yet a parent, parent and childfree — they found that, at 21.64%, “the prevalence of childfree adults is second only to parents,” who make up nearly half of the population (49.62%; sampling error [SE] = 1.81; 95% CI 46.08-53.17). Meanwhile, those who were undecided comprised 9.9% of the population, not-yet-parents were 9.58%, childless were 5.72% and those who were ambivalent were 3.55%.

“We found that 21.6% of adults, or about 1.7 million people, in Michigan do not want children and therefore are ‘childfree.’ That’s more than the population of Michigan’s nine largest cities,” Neal said.

The data can be projected to the U.S. because, according to the researchers, the 2021 census showed that Michigan is demographically similar to the country as a whole. Neal said in the release that if the trend continues on a national level, 50 to 60 million Americans are considered childfree.

“Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, a large number of Americans are now at risk of being forced to have children despite not wanting them,” study co-author Jennifer Watling Neal, MA, PhD, an associate professor in the psychology department at MSU, said in the release. “If further precedents are overturned and birth control becomes harder to access, many young women who have decided to be childfree may also have difficulty avoiding pregnancy.”

When it came to the age in which people decided to not have children, the researchers found that most childfree adults decided they did not want children in their teenage years (34.04%; SE = 5.39; 95% CI 23.47-44.61) or 20s (31.84%; SE = 4.71; 95% CI 22.61-41.07). Just 17.14% reported deciding in their 30s and 6.46% decided in their 40s.

The researchers also sought to understand how warmly childfree adults and parents feel toward each other. The researchers wrote that their interpersonal warmth analysis suggested “asymmetric affective polarization among parents and childfree adults driven primarily by parent’s ingroup favoritism.” Further, they found that “people perceive childfree adults as having more negative traits and less psychological fulfillment than parents.”

“People also express more negative emotions such as moral outrage, pity or disgust toward childfree adults than parents, and parents feel less warm toward childfree adults than childfree adults feel toward each other,” they wrote. “Although this work suggests childfree adults occupy a marginalized status relative to parents, it has relied on non-representative college or convenience samples. In this paper, we use a representative sample to examine within- and between-group judgements of interpersonal warmth among parents and childfree adults.”

With the high number of people who are childfree, the researchers said in the release that “this group warrants more attention” and that “they hope future work will expand beyond Michigan and will help the public understand both why people decide to be childfree and the consequences they experience from that decision.”

“Understanding childfree adults is important because they may make up a sizeable portion of the population and because declining fertility rates suggest that the number of childfree adults may be growing,” the researchers concluded. “Members of this large population experience unique barriers in the workplace and healthcare. For example, childfree adults are often neglected in discussions of work-life balance and are commonly denied access to voluntary sterilization by their physicians. Childfree adults also experience stigmatization and are the recipients of negative stereotypes from parents and other adults without children.”

References:

• Study: One in five adults don’t want children — and they’re deciding early in life. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/959931. Published July 26, 2022. Accessed Aug. 23, 2022.
• Neal Z, et al. Scientific Reports. 2022;doi:10.1038/s41598-022-15728-z.