About 56% of those surveyed indicated that they “just don’t want to have children.”
Photo: Vidal Balielo Jr. / Pexels
A survey found that a growing number of americans do not plan to have children in the short term and probably never will.
The Pew Research Center made a survey of US residents ages 18-49, and 44% said it is “not very likely” or “not likely” that they will have children someday.
This data represents an increase of 7% compared to 2018, the year in which this same exercise was carried out.
What are the factors of not wanting to have children?
Around the 56% of those surveyed who said they had no plans to have children, indicated that “they just don’t want to have children”As the main factor, a common response in both men and women.
The second factor showed that they do not plan to have children due to medical problems, with 19%, while 17% indicated that their limitation is financial reasons; 15% indicated that they simply did not have a partner.
Nearly one in 10 Americans within that age range said they did not expect offspring anytime soon. due to the “state of the world”, while 5% cited climate change and the environment as their motivation for not having children.
Meanwhile, around the 74% of adults under 50 who already have children said they are unlikely to have more children, compared to 71% in 2018, according to the survey.
Other factors
This new data comes when the United States government reported that there is a downward trend in fertility rates, which were already at a record low before the start of the pandemic.
Government data released in May revealed that they were born 4 percent fewer babies in 2020 than the previous year, confirming that the fertility rate fell to the lowest level in decades.
About 3.6 million babies were born last year, the lowest number since 1979, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In this survey, men and women, with and without children, were equally likely to indicate that they probably will not have children or plan to add new members to their families in the future.
The Pew Research Center survey of 3,866 American adults has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.
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