20% of young people say they’re not going to have kids: the latest

**Christy Strawser** (0:01)
The day's biggest stories, the people behind the headlines, the conversations you won't hear anywhere else. I'm Christy Strawser, you're listening to Audacy's On Deadline. It's back to school season, which we'll talk about.
But first, here's another angle. People choosing not to have back to school season, because it's one of the many things that happen when you choose not to have kids. Here's WWJ in Detroit.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:26)
Yeah, so for a couple of years, we've been researching this group called child free. These are people who don't have children and don't want to have children.
And we've been focused on Michigan because that's where we're based, and we knew there were a number of child free people there. What's new about this study is we were able to map the percentage of adults that are child free in every state in the US.
And we were really surprised that Michigan came out toward the top. Seems like Michigan is sort of in the middle of the road on most lists. So it really caught us off guard to see Michigan was the state with the second largest population of child free people right after California. These are adults so 18 and up who don't have children now and do not want to have children in the future.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:11)
What can you learn and what can be taken from a study like this?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:15)
For the longest time, it was sort of assumed that there weren't very many people in this category who just didn't want to have children.
Most of the research in fertility and demography research focused on people who wanted to have children, but couldn't have children due to biological barriers, things like infertility. A few years ago, we started a line of research on this group of people that didn't want to have children. It surprised us that it was a fairly large population in Michigan. We expanded it to nationwide and found that quite a few people in the United States say they don't want to have children. The number of Americans who say they don't want to have children has been growing pretty fast. Over the last 20 years, that percentage has roughly doubled. What we didn't know was how this breaks down state by state. We knew a lot about child free people in Michigan, but we didn't know where else child free people were located. And that was really the goal of this study was to understand, are child free people clustered in certain parts of the country and what's driving that?

**SPEAKER_3** (2:22)
So, let's kind of talk about what is driving that. So part of the things that I saw that was kind of interesting in this is that when you start to look at the future workforce and declining populations in a state, that's when studies like this really become important, because then you're projecting out what kind of, I guess, problems a state could have with a declining population and, you know, knowing that there's not going to be another group of people to take over, people retiring in the future too.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:52)
Right. So that certainly can be one implication for states that have a lot of people that don't want to have children.
It doesn't necessarily imply that a state's going to have a declining population. So the people who do want to have children may choose to have multiple children and make up that difference. States can also still have increasing population sizes if they have a lot of in-migration. So this is one piece of the puzzle, but states that have lots of child-free people are not necessarily states that are going to experience population decline. They could, but it's not guaranteed.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:26)
So why do you think Michigan is a place where the number is so high?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:31)
I wish I had a great answer for that. We tried to look at lots of different features of states that we thought might be important. We looked at a state's cost of living. We looked at, and this was on our radar because of some recent events in Michigan, states laws protecting abortion. We have a recent state constitutional amendment protecting reproductive rights.
And as we looked at these different state policies and features, we really weren't seeing much of an association. So it seems like a state's cost of living has a very small association with whether or not people in that state are childfree, but it's really weak. It doesn't really explain everything. And we found no association between a state's laws protecting abortion and reproductive rights and the likelihood of its residents being childfree. So we've got these numbers and we know where the childfree people are located now, but we're still not entirely sure why some states are really high and some states are much lower.