Speaking of Psychology - Choosing to be child free, with Jennifer Watling Neal, PhD

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

A growing number of adults in the U.S. are choosing not to have children. Jenna Watling Neal, PhD, of Michigan State University, talks about her research that’s found 1 in 5 adults are child free, why people are choosing not to have kids, the stigma child-free adults face, whether people who decide not to have kids early in life usually stick with that choice, and how the prevalence of child-free adults in the U.S. compares with other countries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. For many people, the stereotype of adult life might include a house with a picket fence and 2.5 children. But in the United States, a growing number of adults are saying that they're happy to do without the kids' part of that vision. A 2021 Pew Research Center poll found that 44% of non-parents, ages 18 to 49, said it was unlikely that they would have children in the future, up from 37% in 2018. When asked why, more than half said that they just didn't want to have kids. Despite these significant numbers, until recently not much research had looked specifically at people who choose not to have children, sometimes called child-free adults. Instead, researchers often lump child-free adults in with a larger pool

of people who were childless for other reasons. Now some researchers are beginning to study this group. They're asking questions such as how common is it to be child-free? What percentage of the population is choosing not to have kids? Do people who decide not to have children early in life stick with that decision, or do they often change their minds? Do child-free adults differ from those who have kids in terms of personality or other characteristics? And what about outcomes? Are people who choose not to have kids happier, less happy, or no different from those who do?

What challenges in stigma do child-free adults face and what challenges are there in studying this group? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Jennifer Watling-Neil, a professor in the Social and Personality Psychology Program at Michigan State University. For the past several years, she, along with her colleague in Hunt, husband, Dr. Zachary Neal, have been studying adults who choose not to have children, who they are, what they're like, and how they're treated by others. In addition to her research on child-free

adults, Dr. Neal also studies how kids' peer networks shape their behavior, personality, and well-being. Dr. Neal's research on child-free adults has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and The Today Show, among other media outlets. Dr. Neal, I want to thank you for joining me today. Thanks, Kim. I'm so excited to be here talking about our research on child-free adults with you today. I mentioned in the introduction that researchers often lump child-free adults in with a larger group of people who don't have children for other reasons. So let's start with your definition. What is child-free in your research and how did you choose to use that term as opposed to something else? Sure. That's a great question. So we know from past research that a lot of folks sort of lump all

non-parents together. But non-parents are really a heterogeneous group. And child-free adults are a particular type of non-parent. They're people that don't have any kids and they don't want to have any kids. So they're different from folks who are planning to have children in the future. In our research, we refer to those folks as not yet parents, different from folks who are undecided. Maybe they're not sure whether they want to have kids in the future or not. And they're different from childless people. So childless people are people who don't have kids, but really wanted to have children. Maybe they couldn't have them due to social or medical circumstances. Now, you've done two large studies looking at the prevalence of being child-free among adults in Michigan. What percentage of that

population is child-free? What else did you find? Yeah. So in our research, we looked at a representative sample of adults in Michigan. And we found that between 20 and 25% of Michigan adults are child free. That means that they didn't have kids. And they also expressed that they didn't want to have children in the future. And that was quite a large number. We weren't necessarily expecting to find such a large number of child free folks in Michigan. Did they give any indication as to why they were child free? Yeah. So in our study, unfortunately, we didn't have questions in those surveys. about the reasons for being child-free. But in other studies, there have been lots of studies

that have looked at this question of why people are child-free, and they often give a wide range of reasons. So it could be the high cost of having children, restrictions on freedom or on career growth, medical risks and restrictions on reproductive freedom, climate change, the whole host of things, maybe political forces as well. But as you mentioned in your introduction, one of the most common reasons people give, they found in that 2021 Pew study, is that people just don't want to have children.

How representative do you think your study was of the U.S. as a whole? That's a really good question. So, of course, our research is only focused on adults in Michigan. However, we do not that Michigan's population is similar to the general U.S. population in terms of age, race, education. income and politics. So we believe that our findings might apply more broadly. And if that pattern that we were finding holds up nationally, it would mean about 50 to 60 million Americans are child free. Do you have any plans to do national level follow-up research? We're very interested in doing national-level follow-up research. So one of the things that we've been doing lately is looking at

existing population representative data sets that are available where we could really identify, child free people and distinguish them from other parents. So one such survey is from the Center for Disease Control. It's called the National Survey of Family Growth. They have questions about whether people have children and whether people want children. So we're looking more carefully at that data set, as well as some other data sets in the U.S. and in other countries. Is there any historical data around this? I mean, do we know about change over time? Yeah. So the National Survey for Family Growth has data that's been collected over time. It goes back to the 80s, actually, in 1980s, but the data sets are kind of easy to obtain publicly from 2002. So we're sort of looking

from 2002 now all the way up to 2019 and trying to look at prevalence rates in that data set. How likely are child-free adults, especially younger adults, to change their mind? So people who say that they're child-free when they're in their 20s, do they end? up having kids when they're 30 or 40, or do they tend to make the decision and stick with it? Yeah, this is an outstanding question. So in our data, we were really focused on data sets in Michigan that were cross-sectional. So of course, we couldn't kind of track over time to see if people were actively changing their mind. But one of the things that we did do in these surveys, we asked what age people made the decision to be child-free at? And we found that most child-free

people decided that they did not want children at an early age. They were reporting that they decided that they didn't want children usually in their teens or 20s. And these are people who were on average now about 45 years old and were still child free. So you have to take it a little bit with a grain of salt because it's cross-sectional data. People could be misremembering when they decided. But if we kind of take what they're saying in these surveys, it's suggesting that people decide in early age and they're not likely to kind of change their mind. The mind changing is not particularly common. Do men and women give the same reasons for being child free?

That's a good question. I'm not sure that I know the answer to that. A lot of the studies on child free reasons are qualitative studies, many of them have tended to focus on women as a population's fewer studies out there on men. But I think in that the Pew study, I think the most common reason across men and women, if I'm remembering correctly, was this just, I just don't want to have kids. Now, you found a significant drop in the number of Michigan adults who wanted to have children after the Supreme Court's decision in the Dobbs versus Jackson case, and that's the case that overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Do you believe that Dobbs was a deciding factor for some people? And if so, why? Yeah, we don't know for certain.

we did find this significant drop-in people. Actually, we found a significant growth in people who are identifying as child-free. So it was really interesting. We were collecting data in Michigan pre-Dobbs, and then we were continuing to collect data post-Dobbs. So basically, in 2022, when the Roe v. Wade was overturned by Dobbs v. Jackson, there was sort of significant confusion in Michigan with multiple conflicting court cases about what might happen to abortion rights. So Michigan had a zombie law on the books at that time that outlawed abortion.

And there were many kind of conflicting court cases going on where it wasn't, we weren't sure if that law was going to go into place or not. And that's right around the time when we collected multiple waves of data looking at the prevalence of child-free folks. And during that period of confusion, we observed that the number of Michigan adults identifying as child free rose from 21% before the decision. Those were data that were collected in September 2021 and April 2022 to nearly 26% afterwards in September 2020 and December 2020. So it's a really short time span, and we did see this big growth during that time span. We can't say for certain that that was the Dobbs decision that was contributing to that. But I think it possibly could have been. There's definitely other studies that have shown that rates of sterilization, voluntary sterilization, also went up during that period.

So there's a sense that when people's reproductive freedoms are taken away, that they might opt out of parenthood. And do you think that maybe had cemented what people were already thinking, just knowing that the option maybe wasn't as easy as it had been previously? Yeah, I do think that that could also be the case. So there could have been people who were child-free, but maybe not kind of identifying so much as it. And when the Dobbs decision came down, it kind of put it in stark relief for them. So they were more likely to identify as child-free after that.

Have you found significant differences in personality or other characteristics between child-free adults and adults who have children? Yeah, this is a really interesting question. And our very first child-free study in early 2021, we compared life satisfaction, personality, traits, and political ideology of child-free adults to parents and other types of mom-parents. And the interesting thing here is that we found that child-free people look a lot like everybody else with regards to personality, life satisfaction, and political ideology. So, child-free people were just as satisfied with their lives as parents, childless people, or people who are planning to have kids.

There were also minimal differences in personality between child-free people and these other groups. We did find that child-free people were slightly more liberal than parents. It's not terribly surprising, but the difference wasn't huge. It wasn't like child-free people were like extremely liberal versus parents. So not a ton of differences. Was that surprising? I mean, you might think that people who tend to hold more traditional views of family would, you know, be more likely to have kids and that those who are a little bit, you know, crunchy granola maybe don't feel the same way.

Yeah, it's surprising, but it wasn't entirely surprising. I mean, it wasn't super surprising that there weren't personality differences or life satisfaction differences. I think when people make the change, or when people make the decision to be child-free, they are really kind of making the decision that's right for them. And so it's, you know, just like maybe somebody decides they really want to have kids and be a parent. It's the decision that's right for them. So in terms of that, it's not surprising that life satisfaction is not different. In terms of being liberal, we did find a slight difference.

So we do see sort of this tendency for child-free people to be a little bit more. on the liberal spectrum than a parent who might be a little bit, maybe more conservative. But, yeah, we didn't see this like huge difference in that. What about men versus women? Are more men tending to be child-free than women or vice versa? Do you know? Yeah. So in some of our work, we did find some demographic differences.

So in our research, more men were child-free than women. So about 23% of men identified as child-free. and only 18% of women. More white individuals identified as child free, almost 23% than people of color. That's around 14%. Not surprisingly, people who have always been single are more likely to identify than child free than people who are married or partnered. So people who are single, 31% identified as child free versus people who were married

or partnered 17%. And people who identified as. LGBTQ were more likely to be child-free than adults who did not identify as LGBTQ. You've done some research on stereotypes about child-free adults as well as attitudes that parents have toward child-free adults. What have you found? Is there stigma around being child-free? There is stigma around being child-free. And some qualitative research that's out there has really identified lots of things that child-free people face in their lives because of their decision to be child-free.

We in the U.S. live in a society where the norm is very much still having children and having children is very valued. So people who do not have children and who also don't want to have children are really sort of going against that norm. And common stereotypes that are mentioned often for child-free people, especially women, that they're selfish, self-centered, that they might be focused on their career, that they have no responsibilities, that they have lots of money, but they hate children, and that they might regret their decision later. So they're really common kinds of stereotypes. We looked at,

we sort of developed a very mini-stereotype scale and looked at that stereotype scale. some of our research. And we found that men, people without a college degree and people who have or want children often hold more negative views of child-free people. So they're more likely to endorse some of these stereotypes. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill for burner gas grill on special buy for only $199. and entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. only exclusions apply.

See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. What got you and your husband interested in this particular line of research? And dare I ask, are you child-free? It's a great question. And so we were interested in this line of research, in part, because there's a lot of talk about declining fertility rates in the United States and around the world. And at the same time, we were recognizing that people are more open about their choices, not having kids. And we wanted to understand these child-free people better, especially since I'm not commonly included in academic research. And we knew that there was a lot of studies out there, really good qualitative studies,

really focused on looking at child-free people's experiences. So a lot of those studies used interview techniques and talked with folks about their experiences, but there were fewer quantitative studies with large representative samples. And in particular, a lot of the large representative studies had lumped child-free adults in with these other categories of non-parents that we talked about earlier. So people who are planning to have kids in the future, people who were childless, who really wanted to have kids. And those groups are so different that we really wanted to do quantitative research that focused more explicitly on child-free adults. And my husband and I don't have kids, but we typically try not to focus on our own status.

We really want to kind of keep the focus on the research itself rather than on this. That makes perfect sense. One of your most recent studies looked at how child-free people felt about where they lived, and you found that they were less satisfied with their neighborhoods than parents were. Why was that? Yeah, so this is a really interesting finding. My husband is by training an urban sociologist, so he's oftentimes really interested in these questions of neighborhood satisfaction. And so we found repeatedly in May 2020 and in April 2020,

22, that child-free people and couples without children were less satisfied with their neighborhoods than parents. And we can think of two explanations for this. One is sort of a, what we would call a warmth explanation. So people could be less satisfied with their neighborhood when they're child-free because they're living with lots of other parents. And we know from some of our other research that parents tend to feel much warmer towards other parents. which could indirectly lead child-free people to feel like they're being excluded from neighborhood activities. So if I live in a neighborhood, the majority of my neighborhood are parents, those parents might have social events that are really focused around children.

I might not get invited to those. It might make me feel less integrated into the neighborhood. Another explanation, though, is what we would call our planning explanation. So in April 2022, we serve. both Michigan policymakers and the general Michigan public. And we asked them, when neighborhoods are being designed, whose needs should be prioritized? And in both of those populations,

the preferences of children and parents were prioritized by Michigan policymakers that we surveyed and by the general Michigan public over couples without children. So we had them sort of rank order. We had children and families. We had, you know, empty nester kind of retired folks. And we had, you know, couples of children, couples of that children were always sort of at the bottom of the list in terms of priority.

And so it could be that planners are not really taking into account the needs of child-free adults when they're planning neighborhoods. And, you know, the general public also kind of agrees with that perspective. What would constitute an ideal child-free neighborhood? I'm just kind of wondering if one were to plan. And since this is something that your husband thinks about, if you talked about, you don't need like swings and a slide, but what do you need for a child-free neighborhood?

Yeah, I think that child-free individuals might want, you know, spaces that are similar in some ways to what parents want. They may still want green spaces and parks, but maybe less prioritized around playground. They may want a more active nightlife or things that they can do out. And they may want events that are sort of not always centered around children. So, you know, a lot of events that the neighborhoods hold might be kind of more focused on children, given that the population, most people have kids.

Child-free folks might want some events that are more adult focused in their neighborhoods. Have you found that child-free adults tend to live in more urban areas than people with kids? That's a great question. We haven't looked at that in our research, but I would venture to guess that you would probably find more child-free people in urban areas than in rural or suburban areas. What might be some of the policy and societal changes you think could make a difference in supporting child-free adults and countering some of the stigma? Yeah, so I think just recognizing in policy that child-free adults make up a large percent of the population, like in our research we were finding about a quarter of the folks in Michigan were identifying as child-free, I think just even that recognition that they are a constituent group would help quite a bit and that they may have different needs from parents and children that should be considered in policymaking. I also think that policymakers and just the general public, the more that we can sort of destigmatize being child-free, that we can discuss that this is a normal decision that people can make. So I think the lack of visibility around child-free people in our communities is difficult. It seems like a pretty big but sort of hidden group that there's just still this kind of expectation that people are going to have kids.

So sometimes there's not as much of a realization that there's this group of people out there that don't want to have kids. And I do think in terms of sort of reproductive rights, that's another spot where it's very important in our country. There's been an erosion of reproductive rights. And that could be very harmful to people. who have made the decision that they don't want to have children if they don't have access to reproductive care. A lot of parents feel that there are ways in which policies in the U.S. don't support their needs. For example, around parental leave or childcare for working parents,

does it have to feel like a zero-sum game or other ways to create policies that support both parents and non-parents? Yeah, I hope it's not a zero-sum game. I think that we do need support structures in place for parents, too, including things like parental leave. And I don't think we, I feel like pitting kind of us against them as some of the, as resulted in some of the issues of like stigma, stigma and stereotyping that we might see between these two groups. So I think that we can still have all of the kind of policies in place to support parents, which are important, but also can consider that there may be policies that would be helpful. to child-free people as well. So when we think about leave policies,

even being more inclusive about leave policies, so there might be, you know, parental leave, but maybe we want to expand to family leave so that if someone has a parent that they need to take care of, an elderly parent, that affects child-free people as well, that we have this sort of more expansive view of what supports might need to be in place for things like work-life balance.

Is there any research on child-free adults outside the United States? I mean, I would imagine that there are a lot of cultural factors and other pressures that would vary by country. Are there any trends you're seeing, say, in the U.S. that are mirrored anywhere else in the world? Yeah, so we're seeing a rise in child-free adults, or at least more reporting of child-free adults in lots of different countries. And there are researchers looking at the child-free population in lots of different countries. In our own work, we've been trying to expand to other countries. We recently wrote a paper on Japan. Japan has a very low fertility rate.

It's been a concern for their government for quite some time. And so they have very good government data on fertility rates that goes back over time and is publicly available. And they do ask questions that allow for the distinction of child-free adults from other types of non-parents in this data. And in a recently published paper, we looked at over 250,000 Japanese adults and estimated that over 5.5% of adults in Japan are about 2.5 million people were child-free in 2020. That we could see actually, because the data goes back, that that percentage has been increasing since 20. 2000. And Japanese women, singles, and younger people are more likely to identify as child free in that population. So a little bit different from our Michigan population men are more likely to identify in Japan. It's the women that are more likely to identify as child free.

So, you know, we've been looking at Japan. We also recently started looking at the Philippines, which is another country that there's been some interest in the media on child-free folks in the Philippines. So we were kind of interested in looking at that group along with a collaborator in the Philippines. And we found that the percentage of single women who are child-free is risen pretty dramatically from 4% to about 10% between 2013 and 22. So there's definitely work going on in other countries. and we're seeing similar trends in other countries where we're seeing potential increases and a decent-sized population. It varies.

The prevalence rates vary quite a bit, but we're kind of seeing upticks. Are you lobbying for changes in the way that data are collected? I mean, like government surveys, for example, don't differentiate between people who are just childless for many reasons versus people who consciously decide to be child-free. Yeah, I think it would be worthwhile. I think in some of our research, we've really talked about the types of questions that can be used to identify child-free folks. So you've got questions about whether people want to have kids, questions about people's ideal number of kids, and questions about whether they expect or intend to have kids in the future. those are three different types of questions that can be asked that it could be used to distinguish

child-free folks. If you use those three different types of questions, you get slightly different answers in terms of the prevalence of child-free individuals. We think that questions about the want or desire to have kids are probably the ideal way to ask because it sort of gets up the core of the definition of what a child-free person is or a person who does not want to have kids. And so I think having those types of questions on government surveys would be helpful because it would help to identify and distinguish child-free individuals and from other types of non-parents and you'd get a more fine-grained view of non-parents in those surveys. What are the next big questions you're looking to answer?

Yeah. So we have several questions. that we're interested in right now. So one of them is really expanding out to other countries. So being able to look more carefully at prevalence rates in other countries and expanding to the U.S. more nationally. So being able to kind of get a better view of the prevalence rate across the United States using population representative samples.

But we're also interested in some other questions. We're interested. we've been working a little with Jay Zygmont, who is a financial advisor for child-free folks. And one thing that we're interested in that we're sort of collecting data on right now is really that the special needs that child-free individuals might have in terms of finances. They are distinct from parents in a lot of way in terms of what they will need for their finances when they get older. So I'm really kind of looking at that a bit and some survey work. And I think we're also really interested. You mentioned that I do network research.

So I'm really, one of my fantasies is to be able to combine my work on networks with looking at the child-free population. So really being able to look to see our child-free individuals' networks different from parents and in what ways. And I anticipate that there are some differences in their social networks. And we'd really be interested to see, like, do you do you? Child-free people tend to have mostly other child-free friends, or are they friends with parents as well? And are they more socially isolated, especially at certain ages where maybe activities are really focused around children for a lot of the population?

So those are some of the questions we've been interested in addressing. Well, that sounds really fascinating, and I hope you succeed in your research going forward. I want to thank you for joining me today, Dr. Neal. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www. www.spokenof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org.

Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Warnerman. Thank you for listening for the American Psychology. Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.