The share of American nonparents who say they never want children has more than doubled in two decades, climbing from 14% in 2002 to 29% in 2023, according to research published in the Journal of Marriage and Family by Michigan State University psychology professor Jennifer Watling Neal. This isn’t a temporary dip in birth rates or people simply waiting longer. It’s a growing group of adults closing the door on parenthood entirely, and telling researchers they mean it.
Neal’s study drew on seven waves of the federal government’s National Survey of Family Growth, covering more than 80,000 adults surveyed between 2002 and 2023. Over that same period, the share of nonparents who said they still planned to have children in the future fell from 79% to 59%, meaning the drop in future intentions and the rise in flat-out “no” answers moved in tandem. Fewer people are undecided. More people have made up their minds.
Pew’s Numbers Tell the Same Story From a Different Angle
Separate research backs up Neal’s findings. A Pew Research Center survey of nearly 3,900 U.S. adults ages 18-49 found that 44% of childless adults in that age range said they were unlikely to ever have children, up from 37% just three years earlier, in 2018. That’s a seven-point jump in a single presidential term’s worth of time, among a group of adults still well within typical childbearing years.
When Pew asked why, the answers weren’t dominated by finances or biology the way conventional wisdom might predict. A majority, 56%, said they simply don’t want children, full stop. Medical reasons came in a distant second at 19%, followed by financial constraints at 17%, not having a partner at 15%, age-related concerns at 10%, worry about the state of the world at 9%, and environmental or climate concerns at 5%. Preference, not circumstance, is the single biggest factor driving the trend.
The Certainty Grows With Age, but the Preference Starts Young
Pew’s data shows a sharp age split in how firm that decision feels. Among nonparents age 40 to 49, a striking 85% said they were unlikely to ever have kids, compared with only 37% of nonparents under 40. That’s not surprising on its own, biology and shrinking timelines do plenty of that work. What’s more notable is what’s driving the “no” among younger nonparents specifically: 60% of those under 40 cited simply not wanting children as their reason, compared with 46% of nonparents age 40 to 49, who were relatively more likely to point to circumstances like lacking a partner or medical limitations.
In other words, younger adults who say they don’t want kids are arriving at that conclusion earlier and more decisively than older generations did, rather than drifting into childlessness through unresolved circumstances. And it’s not only nonparents rethinking family size. Pew found 74% of existing parents also said they were unlikely to have more children, a figure that’s held essentially flat since 2018, suggesting the shift toward smaller or child-free households is concentrated specifically among people who haven’t had kids at all, not among parents scaling back.
What This Means for the Shape of American Families
Two decades of federal survey data and Pew’s more targeted recent snapshot are pointing at the same conclusion from different directions: not wanting children has gone from a minority position that needed justifying to a plainly stated preference a growing share of adults feel comfortable naming outright. Neal’s research spans men and women and both biological and nonbiological paths to parenthood, meaning the trend isn’t confined to one gender or one route to becoming a parent.
For couples and families, that has ripple effects well beyond birth rate headlines. It reshapes what a household looks like at Thanksgiving, who inherits what, who provides caregiving as parents age, and how relationships get structured when children simply aren’t part of the plan for one or both partners. The data doesn’t suggest people are having second thoughts later, either. When nearly a third of nonparents say the answer is simply no, and mean it, that’s not a phase policymakers, employers, or extended families can plan around as temporary. It’s a permanent feature of a growing number of American lives.
That permanence is exactly what makes this different from earlier eras of delayed childbearing. Delayed parenthood always assumed kids were still on the horizon somewhere. What Neal’s and Pew’s data both capture is a horizon that, for a meaningful and growing share of adults, simply doesn’t have children on it anymore, not later, not eventually, not once the timing is better. Couples building a life together are increasingly doing so with that question already settled rather than left open for someday.
