More young adults prefer to have pets rather than start a family, according to recent surveys.
Millennials represent 22 percent of that total, citing the cost of having a child as the biggest reason.
“I think I was surprised by the high percentage of respondents willing to take less pay to work remotely and be home with their pets,” said Nicole Beer, the head of marketing and communications for pet pharmaceutical company PetMeds, who commissioned the stay-at-home study.
“I assumed there’d be a chunk, but not that many. A lot of the benefits of working from home and remotely is about comfort and being near your pet, and there are many health benefits to that,” Ms. Beer told The Epoch Times.
The PetMeds survey of 2,000 pet owners, conducted by OnePoll, found that leaving their pets alone at home is a significant source of stress, with respondents expressing worries about their pets experiencing separation anxiety. The survey also found that, on average, pet parents begin to miss their animals only 37 minutes after being apart, and throughout the day, they thought about their pets an average of 13 times.
Ms. Beer believes that the poll results could have resulted from coming out of a COVID-19 lockdown where people were stuck at home. “I wondered if the results of the poll were driven by behavior during the pandemic. But it also made me wonder if the uptick in purchasing pets during that time affected the results as well,” she said.
Not all young adults believe that taking less money at work to be able to work at home and care for your pets is a great idea.
Madison Andrews, a Gen Z administrative assistant at a Detroit area law firm, who is single and has two cats, didn’t mince words when told of the poll results.
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said to The Epoch Times. “I love my cats, and yes, I miss them, but taking a pay cut to spend more time with them is a ridiculous idea.”
Timothy P. Carney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told The Epoch Times that “humans naturally have a caring instinct and want to help raise life.” Those people, he said, “who have opted out of raising human lives, needed to find another outlet and have turned to dogs and ficus trees.”
‘Selfish’
Mr. Carney—who is releasing a book this fall called “Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be”—says the blame some are placing on the cost of raising a child today is overblown.“It may be a little less affordable, mostly because of the price of housing today. But that doesn’t explain the drop in the birthrate. It’s the poorer people in our society who have more kids, not the rich. Look at the recession. People had more kids then than now.”
Pope Francis, who caused a stir last year regarding his comments about young people not having children, walked back into the so-called controversy again this year when he brought up Italy’s declining birthrate. Alongside Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the pope called young pet owners “selfish” and argued that the government must work to reverse birthrate trends.
Also Catholic, Mr. Carney says while he agrees that some childless couples are indeed selfish, it’s wrong to attribute it as exclusive to today’s young people.
“I tend to think selfishness has been common since Adam and Eve ate the apple. I don’t think you can blame selfishness on a lack of marriage and childbearing. Maybe it’s just that people’s selfishness has more free rein today, but it’s not true that millennials are more so.”
