Skipping Out

LinkedIn News presented a story on the Pew report "The Experiences of U.S. Adults Who Don’t Have Children" today, under the headline "More Americans skip having kids." I read the entire report, and the LinkedIn headline didn't strike me as the primary take-away from the document, mainly because it doesn't actually compare parents and non-parents. It doesn't ask people in general if they want to have children, and why (not); while it inquires about expectations, the focus is on asking the childless why they are (or expect to remain) childless. And it doesn't track changes over time; comparing the reasons why adults 50 and over didn't have children to the reasons why adults under fifty don't plan to is not the same as tracking the changes in those reasons over time; the report doesn't have the 30+ years of data needed to tell us if those people who are now 65 years old thought the same was that current 35 year olds do.

But the headline was driving "engagement." People were making comments about how children are simply too expensive for everyone who wants to be a parent to become one, or how this is simply one more data point that proves that Americans are becoming more and more selfish. While it may be true that children have become, as one economist put it: "an expensive luxury good," and people have become more cognizant of the opportunity costs of having children in a world where there are so many possible things to experience, it's hard to draw definitive conclusions from expectations, especially when the relationship between people's past expectations and their current reality is not part of the survey design.

And if, as demographer Alison Gemmill points out to The Washington Post, “Historically, one of the reasons why we think the U.S. has had such a high fertility rate compared to other countries was related to unintended and unwanted pregnancies that resulted in births,” maybe "skip[ping] having kids" is the wrong way to look at things altogether.