Getting the Numbers Right: The Childfree Choice More Prevalent than Reported
In this episode with Dr. Zachary Neal and Dr. Jennifer Watling Neal, we explore their research about the prevalence and characteristics of childfree adults in the US and globally. Despite the fact that people without children make up a significant portion of the population, both nationally in the US (20-25%) and globally, this group remains largely underrepresented in policymaking and demographic surveys. Driven by the desire for more inclusive representation of this group and for more objective demographic reporting, Zak and Jenna’s research tackles the inconsistency across various surveys - both in data collection and data reporting. What sets apart their research from other demographic research is their attempt to create a consistent definition of “childfree” by including specific questions about people’s desire for children rather than their biological capability for having children. Their findings show that among people without children, being voluntarily childfree is significantly more prevalent than being involuntarily childless, which challenges the often alarmist and pronatalist media and demographic narratives.
The underrepresentation of the needs and desires of people without children in real estate planning, which privileges the needs of people with children, is also reflected in their lower levels of satisfaction with their neighborhood. We also discuss how the combination of market forces and alarmist ‘population crash’ arguments are increasingly influencing demographic research, making it less reliable, and why reproductive choice should never be driven by state or economic forces. Lastly, we chat about how the childfree community can leverage social network theory – by using bonding and bridging ties between childfree and parent individuals – to build stronger child-free social networks and shift societal norms towards greater acceptance of child-free choices.
In addition, Michigan State University, where they both work, has created a Childfree Research Fund. Individuals who wish to support this research on the childfree population can make tax-deductible donations to the university and can direct their contribution to this fund.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
-
Jenna Neal 0:00
So we started this research because more and more people had been open about their choice not to have kids. And we really wanted to understand these child free people better, especially since they're not very commonly included in the academic research. There's some good qualitative studies of childfree people's experiences, but far few quantitative studies with large representative samples. And in particular, a lot of the larger representative samples have really lumped childfree adults in with other types of non parents, including people who are planning to have kids in the future, but don't have them yet, and people who wanted to have kids but couldn't have them due to medical or social circumstances. So people who are involuntarily childless.
Zak Neal 0:43
One of the claims that we see frequently in government publications, on social media, in a number of different channels, is the claim that the majority of women who don't have children are somehow victims of infertility or circumstances that lead them to be involuntarily childless. And our data don't support this. And data from other studies don't support this either. For many decades, research has very consistently shown that the majority of non- parents have chosen not to have children, and they're voluntarily childfree.
Alan Ware 1:16
In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, we'll be talking with Dr. Zachary Neal and Dr. Jennifer Watling Neal, psychology professors and prominent researchers in studying childfree people and the childfree choice. Their research is helping to separate myth from reality about this choice in a pronatalist cultural landscape.
Nandita Bajaj 1:45
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step in right-sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 2:08
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, and ecological overshoot and offers solutions to address their combined impacts on the planet, people, and animals. And now on to today's guests. Dr. Zachary Neal is a professor of psychology at Michigan State University. He is the author of four books and more than 100 peer-reviewed research articles, and he serves as the editor-in-chief of two scholarly journals. His primary research focuses on developing statistical models for understanding social networks. But recently his research has also expanded to include an interest in studying the childfree population in the United States and globally. Dr. Jennifer Watling Neal is a professor of psychology at Michigan State University, and is an editor at the scholarly research journal, Social Development. She has authored over 75 peer-reviewed research articles. She is interested in understanding the prevalence and characteristics of childfree adults in the United States and internationally. In addition to her research on the childfree adults, she conducts research on the role of children's peer networks in shaping behavior, personality, and wellbeing.
Nandita Bajaj 3:29
Well, welcome to our podcast, Jenna and Zak, really great to have you on the show.
Zak Neal 3:34
It's great to be here.
Jenna Neal 3:35
Yeah, we're very excited to be here today.
Nandita Bajaj 3:37
Likewise, and you first became known to us about a year ago in early 2023 when our team was preparing to launch a research project to dispel the misinformation spread by a recent film titled, Birthgap. As you know, the film makes several unsubstantiated assertions that population collapse due to declining fertility rates is imminent, and that rising involuntary childlessness is behind this alleged crisis. Your research findings on the prevalence of people who are childfree by choice played a really pivotal role in preparing our counter arguments against this film. For our listeners, our project website, Birthgap Facts can be accessed at birthgapfacts.org. So thank you for your contributions to the project and also to the research in general. We're looking forward to digging deeper into that. So we'll start with your research on the prevalence and characteristics of childfree adults in Michigan. It's received a ton of attention in the childfree community and in the broader media. Could you describe to us the process of how you design that research, specifically, how you focused on creating a more consistent definition of the term childfree? And then also, what were the main findings of your research?
Jenna Neal 4:59
Sure, we'd be happy to chat about that. So we started this research because more and more people had been open about their choice not to have kids. And we really wanted to understand these childfree people better, especially since they're not very commonly included in the academic research. There's some good qualitative studies of childfree people's experiences, but far fewer quantitative studies with large representative samples. And, in particular, a lot of the larger representative samples have really lumped childfree adults in with other types of non-parents, including people who are planning to have kids in the future, but don't have them yet, and people who wanted to have kids but couldn't have them due to medical or social circumstances - so people who are involuntarily childless. And so what we did in these studies is we used a dataset that includes representative samples of Michigan adults. They were completing a survey called the Michigan State of the State Survey. And we asked people a series of three yes and no questions on the survey to help us determine if they have kids, want kids, or don't want kids. So first, we asked them, Do you have or have you ever had any biological or adopted children? If they answer yes to that, then they're parents. If no, then we move on to the next question. So we would ask them, do you plan to have any biological or adoptive children in the future? And if they answer yes to that, we would classify them as not-yet-parents. So these are folks who are kind of planning to have kids in the future. And if they answer 'don't know' we sort of classified them as undecided. These are folks who are kind of on the fence about whether they want to have kids or not. And finally, if they answered no to that second question, we move on to a final question where we asked them, Do you wish you had or could have any biological or adoptive children? That's a question about their desire to have kids. And if they answer yes to that, we will classify them as childless and so the people who really wanted to have kids but couldn't. And if they answer no, those are the folks that we would classify as childfree. These are people who do not have kids. They're not planning to have kids, and they don't want kids. So when we've done that, and we've published several studies that have looked at this and sort of replicated this finding in Michigan, we found that about 21%, or more than one in five adults in Michigan, are childfree.
Nandita Bajaj 7:23
That's a really astounding number, especially given that this group of people is so underrepresented in policymaking and demographic surveys, marketing surveys, and in the media in general. And I especially appreciated the question that you asked about desire, because there's often this conflation that there is some kind of an innate drive to want to have children versus the social circumstances around us, or the cultural norms that tell us what we should and shouldn't do. And so even separating the word desire to create this individual choice is very helpful. Often we don't see that in surveys.
Zak Neal 8:13
I think you're right. Asking the desire question, the sort of third of this yes-no series, I think, is one of the things that sets this work apart from a lot of the other demographic research. So much of the existing demographic research doesn't focus on desire or interest in having children. It focuses on an individual's biological capability of having children. So we're focusing on something that might be considered like a preference or a desire. Much of the research tends to focus on fertility issues. So it doesn't ask, Do you want to have children? It'll ask, Have you had children? Can you have children? And that's certainly important research. But knowing whether a person can or can't have children, doesn't really tell us if their childless or childfree or fit into one of these other categories. Because, you know, one of the things we've tried to emphasize in this work is that a person can be childfree, whether they're fertile or infertile, whether they can or can't have children - that the issue of fertility doesn't really come into play when we're studying these sort of attitudes and desires.
Nandita Bajaj 9:23
Yes, yes. That's a really helpful nuance. I also had a follow up about parents. So you described biological or adoptive. Do you consider stepparents at all in this?
Jenna Neal 9:37
Yeah, that's a great question. So in our surveys and in our questions, we did also include stepchildren as a piece of that. So if you had stepchildren, you were considered a parent. And the reason that we did that is because there is some indication that for childfree people, there are folks that don't want biological children and they also don't want children that are non-biological to them, right. So they also don't want children that are stepchildren, that are foster children, that are adopted. So we take a definition that included both biological children, but also children you may have due to other circumstances.
Nandita Bajaj 10:15
That makes a lot of sense, because I guess, if you're that clear about maintaining that status as a childfree person, your choices and partner will reflect that choice.
Zak Neal 10:27
It highlights some of the difficulty in thinking about how we define childfree people, and one of the things we've struggled with in thinking about how to measure it, because we also get challenging sort of gray area cases. For instance, someone who has been childfree their whole life and say, late in life, marries or remarries, but becomes married to a partner, who earlier in life had children and are now grown adult children. And so we've had to think through, you know, this is a difficult issue, and we don't have a clear answer, but do they become not childfree anymore, if they were never sort of participants in the upbringing of those children, and the children are now you know, in their late 40s, say, by the time they become a partner. And so this issue sort of gets at some of the challenge in putting people into these bins, and measuring. So it's really a complicated sort of thing to think about how we identify people as childfree versus not.
Jenna Neal 11:26
And it also speaks to the fact that childfree status might shift over time, right, or these other statuses might shift over time. They're not permanent things that people are just sort of in from the beginning of, of their life. So you might see somebody who is childless, for example, really wanted kids at some point shift into a childfree status, when they decide, oh, I am actually pretty happy with my situation now. So that's also something we've thought a lot about that these different statuses might shift.
Alan Ware 11:57
And I appreciate that you're trying to create a consistent definition of childfree and you have a recent paper from last year about a framework for studying adults who neither have nor want children. And I think, a critical element like you mentioned, Zak, of the want question that's often not been used in childfree. And it's interesting. I mean, the one in five number that you found was so much higher than as you mentioned, the 2 to 9% rate that other studies had found. And we did have a question of what do you think explains the difference in those estimates of prevalence that your study has really opened the doors for people to see, childfreeness is a lot more common than has commonly been thought?
Zak Neal 12:42
Yeah. So estimating how common childfree adults are is really difficult because there's such little really high quality data that asks the right questions to be able to identify childfree people. But there have been a number of studies say over the past 20 years, and they often reach wildly different estimates of prevalence. For instance, around the beginning of the early 2000s, the US CDC had a report that placed around 6% of women aged 15 to 44 as childfree or voluntarily childless. But another study in 2018, focused on men, estimated 20% of non-parent men are childfree. And so we see estimates that vary really widely. And part of the challenge in sort of pinning it down is that past estimates are hard to compare, because they're computed in such different ways. Some studies compute a prevalence for just women, or just men. Often studies will compute a prevalence for a specific age range. And this is usually, say, what we would typically consider a childbearing age range, something like 15 to 40, or 15 to 45, or something like that. Some studies will report their estimated prevalence as a percent of all adults, but other studies will report it just as a percent of people who don't already have children. And there's also variation in the kinds of questions. So some studies will ask a question about fertility, which is more about biology than about desire. But some studies will ask, when they're trying to identify childfree people, they'll ask about desire. But other studies will ask about one's ideal number of children. Others will ask, How many children do you expect to have? And there are differences in the way people understand desire versus ideal versus expectation. And this is one of the things we're trying to sort through now. It takes a lot of data to be able to pull apart these sort of very nuanced distinctions. But I think one of the reasons our estimates tend to differ from a lot of the earlier studies is that we've been aiming to get something like a population-wide prevalence of being childfree. So if we look at the entire population of adults, how many of them are childfree. And so we're not sort of separating people by age, or by gender, or by fertility. We're trying to get sort of an overall number so that we have a sense how big this population is. So, in a sense, it aims to be more inclusive of the group that we're trying to characterize. But that also means that we might wind up reaching different estimates from other studies that are focused on specific segments of the population.
Alan Ware 15:28
And you've done it in Michigan now more than once. So you had a fairly consistent result there. And you had mentioned Michigan's fairly demographically similar to the US as a whole. So that bodes well for larger scale studies.
Zak Neal 15:44
It does. Certainly we look forward to expanding this study beyond Michigan. Because we live here in Michigan, we're at a Michigan-based institution, it makes it easiest to collect data here. So we've developed a very fine grained portrait of the childfree population in Michigan. But it's difficult to extrapolate too far beyond that. So we're certainly looking forward to examining this sort of data in other states and other countries.
Nandita Bajaj 16:08
Yeah, and I find it interesting also, I think somewhere you mentioned that childfree adults have always been common, but they're more willing to report on it on surveys now, because the choice is more acceptable, and the advocacy around childfree choice has expanded. And that kind of makes a lot of sense. Because if you know you're not going to be socially ostracized or marginalized within your community for having a certain status, then people are just more likely to accept that more confidently than hiding it. For example, I know that in communities like India, or certain more patriarchal countries where it's considered really taboo to not have children, or to not be married, there are people who would lie to their families about their status and say, Well, we're childless, we just couldn't have children, even though they actively made the choice to not have children and fertility was actually not an issue. So, you know, I wonder to what degree some of the self-reporting is also not honest because of internalized pronatalism.
Jenna Neal 17:25
I do think social desirability, in the case of these questions, is an issue. Probably even in the United States, to some extent, where being childfree has become more acceptable, I still think there might be some people who would feel uncomfortable saying that they don't want children. But definitely in other places where the social acceptability of being childfree is even lower, we are really interested in looking at identification as childfree in other countries as well. So not only expanding our work in Michigan to the United States, but also expanding to look at other countries and see what the prevalence rates of childfree individuals are there.
Nandita Bajaj 18:05
That's really great. Another thing you noticed in a recent study is you looked at how the Dobbs decision in the US to allow states to restrict abortion impacted the number of adults in Michigan describing themselves as childfree. What did you find?
Jenna Neal 18:24
Yeah, this was really interesting. So we had been collecting data in Michigan, pre-Dobbs. So we were already trying to look at the prevalence of childfree people in Michigan pre-Dobbs. And right in the middle of when we were collecting data and these different waves of State of the State Survey, the Dobbs decision came down. And so we decided this was a really good opportunity to look to see, does that decision which overturned a federal constitutional protection to abortion, does that have sort of repercussions for whether people are identifying as childfree. And Michigan was a really interesting test case for this, in part because there was a lot of uncertainty in Michigan about access to reproductive care in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs. So what happened in Michigan, there was a complex set of laws, including a 1931 zombie law that was still on the books that criminalized abortion. And so when Dobbs v Jackson overturned Roe versus Wade, what happened was that zombie law became active again, and there were several competing court rulings where the legality of abortion flip-flopped. And these are pretty fast cases, but there was just a ton of uncertainty in the state. So enforcement of the 1931 law was permanently blocked in September 2022 and then was rendered unconstitutional in November 2022, when the majority of Michigan voters voted to approve the right to reproductive freedom amendment, which enshrined reproductive healthcare rights into our state constitution. But we were collecting data right during this period. So we had two waves of data that were collected pre-Dobbs - one in September 2021 and one in April 2022. And then we had two waves that were post-Dobbs. So one was collected in September 2022, and one was collected in December 2022. So right after that vote. And each of those waves had sampled at least 1000 Michigan adults that was representative by gender, age, race and education. So we were really able to take these different waves of data and look pre-Dobbs how many people were identifying as childfree and post-Dobbs how many people were identifying as childfree. And what was interesting is that we found that about 21% of Michigan adults were childfree before the Dobbs decision, and that number jumped to nearly 26% after the decision. So that was over a really short period of time, right? It wasn't that big amount of time. During that period, we also saw declines in adults who didn't yet have children, but were planning to have children - so declines in the number of people identifying as not-yet parents. Of course, these data, we can't say that Dobbs caused an increase in childfree people. But we can say that there seems to be like an association there, right. There was a jump pre to post, which is very interesting.
Nandita Bajaj 21:16
Yeah, and, you know, we've written pieces about how abortion bans, like the ones we are seeing in the US, and now increasingly globally, are being put into effect in response to greater gender equality, and just in response to declining fertility rates, you know. Historically, it's been done to grow the nation's population. And so, in this case, it's probably also really telling that as coercive pronatalism is on the rise, more and more people are waking up to the impacts of larger types of pronatalism, that are even more subtle, and really questioning the pervasiveness of the pressure to have children. And it's not that, like you said, people are deciding not to have children because of abortion bans, but maybe they are deciding to claim that status with a little more confidence as a political statement against legislation of people's reproduction and kind of this interference with this very personal decision.
Zak Neal 22:23
Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, we've tried to think about some of the reasons that this kind of decision might lead us to observe more childfree people. And we think that some of it could be folks just looking at the world around them, seeing this move toward a more authoritarian control over women's bodies and reproductive health in general, and simply thinking, this is not the kind of world I would want to bring a child into. But one of the other things we've thought about - so often this sort of legislation, and especially in the case of Roe v. Wade and its overturning, is framed as a prohibition against abortion, which certainly it is. But what we've seen in the aftermath of Dobbs is that it's much bigger than that. So while it did in many places prohibit abortion, it also put into jeopardy all kinds of other prenatal and reproductive health care that makes it simply more risky to be a pregnant person. It introduces health risks. In the event that there was a complication, one may not be able to get the medical treatment that's necessary; because the legal status of those treatments, although they may not be abortions, per se, became murky and uncertain. And so, you know, we think some of the jump could be the general political climate. But some of it could simply have been the the additional medical risks that one takes on by making the choice to become a parent.
Nandita Bajaj 23:53
That makes a lot of sense too, yeah.
Alan Ware 23:56
So you've also conducted studies looking at the prevalence of stereotypes about childfree of people, as well as the lack of interpersonal warmth that parents and even potential parents are more likely to feel toward childfree people. So could you describe some of the findings of that research you found?
Zak Neal 24:16
Yeah, so we've looked at warmth and the stereotype in a couple of different ways. In some of our earliest studies, we were interested in how parents and childfree people feel about each other. And one of the things we found is that although parents don't feel particularly negative toward childfree people, parents do feel especially warm toward each other. That is, parents feel an especially strong bond toward other parents. And so one of the things that means is that parents' strong preference for other parents may mean that childfree people wind up getting left out of say social events or they may wind up feeling out of place in an otherwise parent-focused or child-focused sort of setting. And this can happen even if parents don't have any sort of actual negative feelings towards childfree people. It could be driven simply by parents' stronger feelings of warmth toward other parents. In some of our other work, more recently, we've also tried to start thinking about stereotypes of childfree people and the childfree population. As a historically minoritized group, we anticipated there might be some stereotypes held about members of this population. And so we developed a scale that included things like the belief that childfree adults have little stake in the future, or childfree adults are selfish. You know, trying to identify some of the common things that we see in media articles, on social media, stereotypes and false beliefs that are sometimes held about childfree people. And we wanted to see if we could develop a scale that would allow us to measure these things consistently in the population. And the scale we've developed seems to work fairly well. And, and we found some patterns in who holds these stereotypes. It looks like from this preliminary work, men hold slightly stronger stereotypes of childfree people than do women. The stereotypes are more strongly held by non- college graduates than by college graduates. And they're also held by people who have or want children. So people that are planning to become parents in the future often also hold these stereotypes.
Alan Ware 26:33
And you've also looked more generally at the personalities and the life satisfaction, and the likelihood of their changing their mind about their childfree decision. What were some of those findings?
Jenna Neal 26:46
Yeah, so for life satisfaction, we looked at that in our earliest study. We used a common life satisfaction scale that's used in psychological studies. And we found that childfree people are just as satisfied with their lives as parents, as childless people, or as people who plan to have kids in the future. So there weren't any differences there in life satisfaction. We also looked at this question of changing minds. So this is a common refrain also among people -that when people are young they'll kind of say they're childfree, but later on, they're gonna change their minds, and they're gonna want to have kids. And in two papers we asked childfree adults to report when they made the decision to not have kids. So it's sort of retrospective. It's not perfect data by any sense. But when we asked this question, we found that on average, people decided to be childfree early in life, so generally in their teens and 20s. And these people who reported that they were deciding to be childfree in their teens and 20s, on average, were nearly 40, and still didn't have kids. So it was suggesting that they were maintaining this childfree status for quite some time, suggesting that they weren't really changing their minds later in life.
Nandita Bajaj 28:00
And of course, on the flip side, the question about regret and possibility of changing the decision is often not asked of parents. Did you find anything in your research about the number of people who had children who regretted having children, whether it was your own research or other research?
Zak Neal 28:22
Yeah, it's a really interesting issue. We talked a moment ago about the framework that we've been developing. And one of the things we wanted to include in the framework is not only distinguishing different varieties of non-parents, you know, childless, childfree, undecided, but also distinguishing different varieties of parents. And so we've proposed separating them into, for instance, willing parents or parents who have children and wanted to have children, and what we call regretful parents. So maybe people who have children, but would have preferred not to. But as you say, this is a very difficult group to study, because the norms against being childfree are strong, but the norms against being a regretful parent I think, are even stronger. But this is something that we're just starting to investigate as we expand this work to other countries. So it's very difficult to get people to report they wish they had no children if they had children. But it's somewhat easier for people to admit that they have more children than they wanted to have. Say, a person who has two children, but was really aiming to have one, or has three children but was aiming to have two. That seems to be easier for people to admit and report on surveys. And so this is something we've started to investigate, because a number of surveys will ask people, How many children do you have now? And what is your ideal number of children? And in a decent number of cases, a person's ideal number of children is smaller than the number of children they already have. And so this is something that we're excited about digging into a little deeper. It's another sort of marginalized reproductive category much like the childfree. And so we think it's really interesting too for its status as a marginalized group, but also interesting from a research point of view because they're so difficult to measure.
Nandita Bajaj 30:17
It's not a huge surprise that the ideal number of children is usually lower than the number of children some people have had - given that half of all pregnancies not just globally, but even within the US, are unplanned. You have also researched the different perceptions that childfree people have of their local neighborhoods and workplaces compared to parents or would-be parents. What were some of your findings there?
Zak Neal 30:43
This is one of the things that we started investigating midway through this research. We were interested in how childfree adults and couples without children fit into their local neighborhoods. And so we started asking people, not just the childfree, but the entire population, How satisfied are you with the place where you live with your neighborhood? And across two different studies in Michigan, we found that childfree adults and couples without children were significantly less satisfied with their neighborhoods than parents were. And we weren't surprised by this, but we weren't quite sure what explained this sort of phenomenon. And we think there are two possible explanations, two things that might lead childfree adults to be less satisfied. So one possibility comes back to the difference in warmth that we talked about a few minutes ago. So we already knew that parents have particularly warm feelings towards other parents, even if they don't have negative feelings towards childfree people. And this could indirectly wind up excluding childfree residents and other non-parents from neighborhood life. You know, for example, to the extent that so much of neighborhood life in US neighborhoods is organized around the local public school, there's relatively limited opportunity for non-parents and especially chidfree adults to really get involved in that neighborhood life. You know, it could simply be that in these sorts of settings, childfree adults simply don't know about neighborhood events that they could participate in. Or it could be that they simply don't feel comfortable at neighborhood events that are parent or child-focused. So we think that this difference in warmth might be part of the explanation for the lower satisfaction. But we also started asking people, When neighborhoods get planned whose needs should be prioritized in sort of discussions about what makes a good neighborhood? And we asked this of the general public in Michigan, but we also had an opportunity to ask this question of state policymakers - so elected representatives and their staffers. And in both cases, both the general public and state policymakers agreed that in discussions about planning neighborhoods, the needs of parents and children should be prioritized over the needs of couples without children. And if this is a widely held belief - that childfree adults' preferences for what makes a good neighborhood shouldn't really have room in that conversation and especially if this is a belief among policymakers - it's maybe no surprise that childfree adults needs and preferences for what a neighborhood might look like are simply going to go unsatisfied. Because the folks involved in making these sorts of decisions don't believe they should carry much weight. So this is something we're still trying to investigate, you know, understand why we see this gap and satisfaction, but we think those could be two possible explanations.
Nandita Bajaj 33:47
Yeah, that is astounding that people like policymakers would even admit to that bias in answering that question. But it speaks to the pervasiveness of that belief. And reflecting on our own experience, my husband and I, we specifically chose a condo building that is filled with people who are, many of whom are living alternative or non-dominant lives - a lot of single people, a lot of childfree people or, you know, small families. So I think that the desire to be with people living similar lives or lifestyles as you probably goes both ways, in people wanting to see reflected in society more of their lifestyle as well. But we're lucky because we could find a neighborhood like that. But in places that are primarily built around people with children, it's very clear how marginalized people without children or single people would feel.
Zak Neal 34:52
You know where we live in East Lansing, it's a typical Midwestern US college town. And as a consequence, there are two types of housing stock. There are small student apartments near campus, and there are big standalone multifamily residences. And there's nothing in between. There are no condominiums for couples, for young professionals. You can buy a five bedroom home in the suburbs, or you can buy a shared four bedroom apartment on campus. But there are limited choices in the real estate market. And I think that's probably the case in a lot of different settings, that perhaps for these sorts of reasons, this is not a population whose needs are served by all sorts of neighborhoods.
Jenna Neal 35:38
And our house is much bigger than we would actually need. Because there are not apartments available or smaller housing available for small families.
Alan Ware 35:47
I was just thinking of all the infrastructure in North American cities that was built when family size was so much larger. I remember seeing the population of Minneapolis being much lower at 1910, but the number of kids in schools was double or some just some mind-blowing number. So yeah, and they were building up these cities, investing in the roads and the sewers and the electrical infrastructure, and all of it was being centered around these burgeoning populations of children. And now we're stuck with a lot of that. But to the extent they keep building around that previous investment, previous infrastructure model that's based on larger families, higher fertility, they're really trapping themselves in an outmoded paradigm. And you both have researched about childfree people in Japan. So that's kind of your first cross-cultural foray into this research. So what have you learned so far from that? And how do you think that might be applied to studying childfree people in other countries other than the US?
Zak Neal 36:53
Yeah, as we've talked, a lot of our research started in Michigan, but we wanted to expand it beyond Michigan, to look at other places and other countries. We hadn't set out to specifically investigate Japan, per se. Well, we started because we were interested in understanding how really nuanced features like a person's age or marital status or even more narrow than that, how the question on the survey is worded, affects what estimates of prevalence a study might get for childfree people. And the challenge doing this sort of research in the United States is there are very few surveys that ask these sorts of questions. What we found though is, largely driven by the falling fertility rates in Japan, the Japanese government has collected an enormous quantity of very high quality demographic data over many decades. And this data is publicly accessible and gave us an opportunity in another cultural setting to be able to really dig into these details and understand, how do these little features of the way surveys are constructed affect how we might measure childfree people, and how many childfree people we might observe. And so in our initial work in Japan, we collected 83 different government demographic surveys over the past 20 years. So collectively, this surveyed over a quarter million Japanese adults. And this much data let us take a much more nuanced look at the childfree population than would be possible in Michigan, or the United States. And we've started to see some patterns here. So for instance, we found that the likelihood of being childfree in Japan is five times higher for singles than for partnered couples, and about 20% higher for women than for men. But what we think is particularly interesting is that there's a clear upward trend. So the prevalence of childfree adults has been increasing in Japan by about three and a half percent every year since 2000. And it does make a difference how the question is worded in the surveys that we use to study them. So for example, if we identify childfree people from a survey, by asking them a question that uses the word expect - do you expect to have children will get a higher prevalence estimate than if we used a survey question that asks them about a want or a desire. Do you want to have children? And so it's this sort of nuanced understanding of the way surveys and data work that we hope will inform some of our future work in the United States also, because it gives us an idea how survey questions need to be worded, and how that wording affects the sorts of results that we might see.
Alan Ware 39:43
And you found an estimate of 8.8% of the population of Japanese adults aged 18 to 50 declaring childfree in 2020, or you determined they were childfree. That kind of surprised us of how low that seems relative to Michigan, but we also, in talking with Isabel Fassbender, a researcher in Japan, wondered how much that's kind of an internalized pronatalism, that the stigma of admitting or talking about your childfree desire would make you be maybe less honest with yourself and less honest with the interviewer. What do you think about the number you found?
Zak Neal 40:27
Yeah, that's certainly something that we thought about, you know, it's lower than the prevalence that we've estimated in Michigan. However, from our understanding of the culture of children and child raising in Japan, although there's a strong norm toward pronatalism in the United States, it's much stronger in Japan and Japanese culture, paired with the fact that although there are pronatal policies in the United States, there has been a concerted institutional and government effort to increase fertility rates in Japan for many decades. And it's very well-funded and very well-organized beyond anything that we've seen in the United States. So we think that the cultural and the institutional forces are probably coming together to give us a lower prevalence estimate in Japan than we see in the US. But this is certainly something that we're continuing to fine tune as this wealth of Japanese data lets us understand better how to estimate prevalence more accurately.
Nandita Bajaj 41:26
That certainly lines up also with the interview we did with Isabel Fassbender, who was talking about how this response to fertility decline has been met with this toxic mix of patriarchy, but then also biomedical capitalism. So this fertility industry that has joined forces with the government and with media agencies to really infiltrate both the education system and the mainstream media, with basically pronatalist pressures, saying why it's good for women to start having children earlier. And then, of course, nationalism is playing a huge part there too, because there's this pressure to have more Japanese children. Maybe you can respond to that in how you designed the question. And what was your reasoning behind the nuance in the question you were asking about, How many children do you expect versus want? Why do you think people are responding differently with those two words?
Jenna Neal 42:25
So when you ask somebody if they expect to have children, that can conflate childless people and childfree people, because when you ask an 'expect' type question, people who are childless might say, I don't expect to have children, maybe because of social circumstances, or maybe because fertility issues. There's a number of reasons and barriers that might mean that somebody doesn't expect to have children. But that doesn't necessarily mean they don't want children. So for an 'expect' question, if you're really trying to identify childfree people, in which childfree people differ from childless people based on the lack of desire to have children, that 'expect' question isn't quite as nuanced and able to kind of parse those two groups. So the 'want' question, you're gonna get a little bit lower prevalence rate, but probably a more accurate one. And the Japanese data is really interesting, because a lot of the surveys that we have lots of different types of questions. So we had 'expect' questions. We had 'want' questions. We also had those 'ideal' questions as well - so where people were asked, What's the ideal number of kids that you want, and could answer from zero to however many they wanted. And so we were able to kind of compare all three of those, which was really interesting from a measurement standpoint. So the other part that's interesting here is that there is a lot of differences between countries, and that the context of these countries matters a lot for the prevalence of childfree individuals. And we're really interested in that as well. We're just starting to explore the childfree population in over 50 countries in the developing world. There we're really interested in whether methods of birth control and access to reproductive care might play a role in whether people identify as childfree. There's also the pronatal context around these countries. So one country that we're looking at most recently is the Philippines. And in the Philippines since 1993 the prevalence of childfree adults has increased. And it's more than doubled among married people, but is pretty low overall still. It went from .2% to .5%. So really, really low level of people identifying as childfree when they're married in the Philippines. But if you look at single people, it's jumped substantially from 3.9% in 2013, to over 10% in 2022. So at least among single people in the Philippines, you're seeing decently high prevalence rates of childfree folks.
Nandita Bajaj 44:54
That's interesting. And I think that also speaks to probably the level of acceptance. Maybe there's increased acceptance because of increased advocacy around childfree people. And the designing of your question also reminded me of another conversation we had with kind of a behavioral economist, who was saying the way a lot of the demographic surveys are designed, are inherently kind of pronatalist or not neutral. They kind of just take people's word at face value without recognizing the context within which people are responding. It's really heartening to hear that you are trying to broaden that research with the kind of nuance you're using in your wording, to move away from that inherent or implicit bias.
Zak Neal 45:44
I can maybe offer a simple example of how that subtle wording difference can impact researchers' ability to do this sort of work. So, many countries have a General Social Survey. The United States General Social Survey, the GSS, has been running for many decades, the Canadian GSS for many decades. And in all of these surveys for many years, they asked this 'ideal' question, What is the ideal number of children for you? And our research suggests that there may be some pros and cons to using a question with that sort of wording. But it can get us close to an estimate of prevalence for child rearing. It can help us identify which survey respondents are childfree. But about 20 years ago, the wording of that question changed. So it used to ask, What is the ideal number of children for you? Those surveys now asked, What is the ideal number of children for a hypothetical family? Which is why if you're just scanning the survey codebook, it looks like the same question. But it's different in a very important way that makes it impossible to know if the respondent themselves is childfree. It makes it impossible to estimate the prevalence of childfree. It's difficult to know how someone would form an opinion about the ideal number of children for someone else, or for a hypothetical family. And so the question looks very similar, but it's different in a way that makes it not useful to answer some of these questions.
Nandita Bajaj 47:13
Right.
Jenna Neal 47:14
It's such a bad question. I mean, I like to ask them why they shifted to that, because it also assumes that somebody could answer that the ideal number of children is like the same for everybody. I don't know, it's such a weird question.
Nandita Bajaj 47:30
One thing, you know, we found that demographic research more and more is being influenced by market forces. And so a lot of it is being conducted more in terms of, you know, economic growth. And so I wonder how much of that bias is entering some of these larger surveys where they simply cannot stay objective?
Zak Neal 47:55
I think you're right that increasingly surveys are driven by sort of economic motives. But there's a risk here that underestimating the prevalence of the childfree population is underestimating the economic weight of this population. This is a large segment of the population. If our Michigan estimates hold up nationwide, we're talking about many millions of adults with income and disposable income and retirement needs, that buy homes and cars and things like that, that are completely off the radar for economic forecasting, off the radar for advertisers. You see lots of commercials that are advertising to parents as a target audience, but you never see commercials advertising products to the childfree population, despite the fact that we think it's a fairly substantial chunk of the population. So I think you're right, that economic incentives drive how surveys get constructed. But I think they're driven based on some incorrect and underestimated prevalence estimates on the childfree. I think this is a bigger population than economic actors realize.
Nandita Bajaj 49:06
Right. We're also seeing more explicitly pronatalist policies and agendas being pushed in governments around the world. Some of it partly due to this, you know, fear of economic decline, and some of it because of nationalism, from leaders like Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, and Xi Jinping in China, and dozens of other countries, providing so many pronatalist kind of monetary incentives to boost their birth rates. You're both involved in studying and applying network theory, or the study of how complex systems behave and evolve. And you've applied network theory to various topics, including social networks, urban planning, public health, and education. What might network theory tell us about how misinformation and stereotypes about this specific group of people, the childfree demographic, can circulate and spread throughout societies?
Zak Neal 50:06
It's a great question. You know, as you've commented, this propaganda in some cases or pronatalist agendas, and in many cases misinformation, is increasingly circulating - in some cases on social media, in other cases institutionally promoted by governments and states. And I think one of our goals in this work is to just identify what pieces of information are real, and identify what pieces of information simply don't seem to be supported. For example, one of the claims that we see frequently in government publications, on social media, in a number of different channels, is the claim that the majority of women who don't have children are somehow victims of infertility, or victims of circumstance that lead them to be involuntarily childless. They would have children if only it weren't for these factors that are preventing them from realizing their full potential as mothers and fathers. And our data don't support this. And data from other studies don't support this either. For many decades, research has very consistently shown that the majority of non-parents have chosen not to have children, and they're voluntarily childfree. Most of the studies out there that allow us to distinguish the childfree adults from the childless adults suggest that being childfree is somewhere around three times more common than being childless. And so that's not to marginalize the difficulties that couples may struggle with infertility. This is a real problem and something that can be addressed. But it's not as common as some of the messaging might suggest.
Alan Ware 51:48
Your network theory reminds me kind of we talked with Naomi Oreskes about market fundamentalism and how some of that came to fruition in the early 70s with Heritage, Cato or AEI, all of these being formed, to put forth these market fundamentalist ideas. We have some of that with these pronatalist conferences around the world. And even in some of the AEI and Heritage, a lot of those have a strong pronatalist bias - a lot of these think tanks on kind of the market fundamentalist/conservative right. So it is concerning how seeing how they were quite successful in that previous network theory that they expanded ideas out into politics, that they might be poised to do that again. And having better information and having studies like yours to push back against some of their erroneous claims can help a great deal.
Zak Neal 52:47
Right. And I think, you know, many of these conferences are implicitly or often explicitly framed in terms of a proposed population crash, that these sort of trends that they and we look at our research mean that the size of the human population is suddenly going to dramatically decline. And, you know, it's certainly true that birth rates have been declining in many countries. So that by itself is not an instance of misinformation. But it's tracking something slightly different from what we've been studying. So birth rates are tracking whether people have children. And we're really interested in whether people want to have children, which is it's a different sort of outcome. And so while birth rates are declining, at about the same time that we think the prevalence of childfree adults have been increasing, there doesn't seem to be strong evidence that these two simultaneous trends are directly related. That is to say, we don't have strong evidence that birth rates are falling, because people are choosing to be childfree. It's certainly possible that could be one contributing factor to what we see as declining birth rates. But even if that were the case, we think there's a couple of reasons why that may not be the problem that it's being framed as, you know, by some of these institutions at some of these conferences. If we think of seeing rising rates of childfree adults as an indicator of a level of self-determination, it suggests that increasingly, people are having the freedom to decide not simply whether they do have children, which has been made possible by methods of birth control, but they're also developing the freedom to decide whether they want to have children. And I think some of the pushback that the information about, you know, a claimed population crash is experiencing is that we believe that people shouldn't be pressured to have children for the good of society, or for the good of the economy. We think that in a general sense, seeing that people have the freedom to decide whether they want to become parents or don't want to become parents is probably a good thing.
Alan Ware 54:51
And what would you see as what network theory can tell us about how to build stronger childfree social networks, that greater self-determination, and start to shift societal norms and even policies towards greater acceptance of the childfree choice?
Jenna Neal 55:10
Yeah, so there are these network theories of bonding and bridging. And those are pretty useful in thinking about how we might build stronger childfree social networks, and also to shift these broader societal norms and policies towards greater acceptance of the childfree choice. So bonding occurs when people form really tightly knit social networks where everybody interacts with everybody else. So this is the case when you might have people who really trust each other, really cohesive. And networks that are high in bonding often have high levels of trust and social support. And parents might have an easier time forming those types of networks that are high in bonding, because they have a lot of shared common activities related to their children. So we talked about this a little bit earlier, when we were talking about neighborhoods. Lots of times parents come together at the PTA meetings and come together at their kids sporting events, they have playdates, so they have lots of opportunities to form these tightly knit networks. In the past, it's been a bit harder for childfree individuals to form those networks, because they're excluded from many of these activities that parents engage in. And it's also kind of harder for them to locate other childfree people. So especially in the past, the childfree identity wasn't always known to everybody. People kind of hid it from each other. So childfree people weren't really able to kind of form those connections with each other either. However, as being childfree becomes more recognized as an identity, that might change. So for example, there are now childfree meetup groups that might bring childfree people together who share common interests that could help them form these more tightly knit networks that encourage strong trusting communities. So that's bonding. But there's also bridging, and bridging, I think is where shifting societal norms might come in. So bridging occurs when people form relationships that connect them to different groups of people that otherwise aren't so connected. So they're bridges between different groups. And networks that are high in bridging are really good for facilitating the spread of information across a network. So for childfree individuals, if they're able to form bridging ties with parents and other types of non-parents, that can be really helpful for normalizing attitudes towards the childfree population. That's having this bonding ties with other childfree individuals, but also bridging ties out to other non-childfree individuals that might really kind of strengthen childfree networks.
Nandita Bajaj 57:40
And I also appreciate your point about moving beyond the bonding, how important the bonding experience is, but also the bridging because not all parents feel indifferent towards childfree people. And if they do, it's probably as you're finding because of biases they hold about childfree people. And vice versa. Not all childfree people feel an indifference toward people with children. And we don't want to end up in a societal situation where we are completely separated in terms of how the neighborhoods are built with this is a neighborhood for families, this is a neighborhood for people without children or single people. Because that creates this kind of chasm or this break within society. You know, media narratives have been playing enough of a part in creating that separation between parents and non-parents. But we want to move toward more of a cohesive society where parenthood and non-parenthood is just simply seen as two equally valid legitimate choices and where it doesn't need to be, not everything needs to be, centered around our reproductive decisions.
Jenna Neal 58:48
Yeah, I agree completely. I think there is oftentimes this us versus them mentality between the two groups. And really, everyone should be allies, right? We should be supporting each other and our decisions.
Zak Neal 59:00
And I think some of these higher prevalence estimates that we've observed, and other studies have observed, might suggest that some of this is already happening without anyone noticing it. So in our case of Michigan, 20 to 25% of the adult population is childfree. That means that most likely many of your friends, many of the people that you work with are childfree, even if you don't know they're childfree. So we're already interacting with each other. It's easy to know if someone's a parent. It's harder to tell if their childfree. But, you know, often that's going to be the case. I think what's promising is we're seeing people be more open about a childfree status than they had been before. So it's, they've always been there but it's getting it out in the open as an identity that you can share as much as you know, parents might share their identity.
Alan Ware 59:49
Yeah, as childfree researchers, with all the research you've done so far and the research you have planned, what would be the most interesting research questions you would like to ask to childfree people and about the decision in general if resources weren't an issue?
Zak Neal 1:00:07
Gosh, if resources weren't an issue, the researchers dream. Yeah. I mean, there's been research for decades on this group. But it's been limited. And so I think there's a lot of open questions about this population. One of the things that we'd be particularly interested in exploring more, much of our studies and other studies have compared, say, childfree people to others, or differences between people. And we're particularly interested in what's going on within people's lives. So we're interested in following the trajectories that childfree adults and non-childfree adults have taken to arrive at where they are now. You know, we anticipate that for some people, they've known they were childfree since they were little kids. But for others, they may have started assuming they'd be parents, and then shifted to being a bit undecided. And then maybe they become childfree. Or maybe someone was initially childless, struggled with fertility, but later realized, in fact, they didn't want children and became childfree. There's lots of ways that people can follow different pathways to becoming childfree. And in fact, lots of pathways that people can follow to any of these other sorts of reproductive statuses too. The challenge in understanding that is that we have to follow people for a long period of time, via survey with people - every year, every couple of years, for 40,50,60,70 years, can't hit fast forward on their lives. And so that's one of the resource constraints here is time to let these things play out and see how they evolve.
Alan Ware 1:01:43
That could be wonderful. That reminds me of the Harvard happiness study, right, is one of the gold standards for longitudinal happiness data that goes back to the 40s? I forget when they started studying those men. But that would be beautiful. So many research questions, so little time, between the two of you. Thank you for all the work you are doing with such relatively few researchers in this field. And you've already made some great research findings available for all of us.
Nandita Bajaj 1:02:15
Yeah, and we really appreciate what you're doing also to better understand the reality of childfree people, great to have academic research on this subject, because there's been so much great advocacy around it. And now it's just really good to have it supported with objective data. Thank you so much for joining us.
Zak Neal 1:02:35
You've had some great questions. It's been a pleasure to be able to share some of this work.
Jenna Neal 1:02:39
Yeah, I agree. It's been really great to chat with both of you.
Nandita Bajaj 1:02:43
Thank you. Before we sign off, we want to mention that, if you as a listener would like to suggest any research questions or topics within the childfree choice domain to Jenna and Zach, to please reach out to them directly. Their contact information can be found in the show notes.
Alan Ware 1:03:00
And that's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit population balance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you will consider a one time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 1:03:32
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts and helping us all shrink toward abundance.
