Survey Shows Top Reasons Why People Choose Not to Have Children

Children sit in a classroom at the Bethel Day Care Center in Brooklyn, New York, on June 14, 2012. Benjamin Chasteen/The Epoch Times

Almost half of American adults under the age of 50 are saying they’re unlikely to have children, and a major reason is they just don’t want to, a new report by Pew Research Center suggests.

According to the report published July 25, some 47 percent of childless adults under 50 last year said it’s unlikely they'll ever have children—up from 37 percent in 2018.

Pew has been conducting surveys over the past decade to track trends in the reasons why Americans aren’t having as many children as prior generations. These new findings come as the total fertility rate in the United States continues to hit historic lows, falling below the 2.1 children-per-woman that is considered the “replacement level” needed to replenish the country’s population.

When it comes to the biggest reason people under 50 are choosing not to have kids, more than half of them (57 percent) said they “just don’t want to.” The other most popular reasons include wanting to focus on other things like their career (44 percent), being concerned about the state of the world (38 percent), and being unable to afford to raise children (36 percent).

Some 13 percent pointed to infertility or other medical problems as reasons for having no children.

For those aged above 50 who never had children, the top response (39 percent) was that it “just never happened,” followed by never finding the right partner to have children with (33 percent), and simply not wanting to (31 percent).

About 4 in 10 of those in the older crowd (38 percent) reported there was a time when they wanted to have children. A smaller but sizable share (32 percent) say they never wanted children, and 25 percent say they weren’t sure one way or the other.

The findings also highlight differences in responses between men and women.

According to the results, women and men in the below-50 age group cite many of the above-mentioned factors at similar rates. But women (64 percent) are more likely than men (50 percent) to say they are unlikely to have kids because they just don’t want to. There are also more women than men reporting they felt societal pressure to have children.

Pew conducted the survey last year among 770 adults under age 50 and 2,542 childless adults aged 50 and older. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 5.3 percentage points for the older group and plus or minus 2.4 percentage points for the younger group.

In 2023, there were about 3.6 million babies born nationwide, which is about 76,000 fewer than in 2022, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s statistics division. The federal agency said the national birth rate consistently decreased by 2 percent each year from 2014 to 2020.