Does It Seem Like Everyone Has Kids?

To adults who do not have children, it sometimes seems as if everyone else does. Political rhetoric is filled with pledges to address the needs of families or “working families,” even when the proposed policies are also relevant to single people and couples without children. Many goods and services, such as “family plans,” are offered at special rates for families. Adults with no kids sometimes feel that they see their friends and relatives who do have kids less often while those kids are still living at home.

In fact, though, there are important ways in which children now have a smaller place in the lives of adults in the U.S. than they had a few decades ago. (The available statistics typically focus on women, but these issues are relevant to everyone else, too.)

Here are some examples:

1. The percentage of women who have children has been decreasing.
2. For those who do have children, the age at which they do so has been increasing. That means that there are more years of their young lives when they do not (yet) have children.
3. Of those who do have children, fewer are having three or more children. When women have fewer children, the total number of years they have children living with them at home is likely to be shorter.

In a report from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research, “Women’s prime parenting years, 1980 and 2020,” Adrianne R. Brown described and elaborated on those trends and documented others.

For example, she found that:

1. In 2020, many fewer women were parenting in their early 20s than in 1980. At age 24, in 1980, nearly half of all women (46 percent) were parenting. By 2020, only about a quarter of 24-year-old women (24 percent) were parenting.
2. The median age of all mothers was 34 in 1980. By 2020, it had jumped to 38.
3. By the time mothers get to their early 50s, most do not have any minor children living at home anymore.
4. Women with more formal education tend to have their children at later ages. For women with a high school diploma or less formal education, fewer than one-quarter still had kids at home by the age of 51. For women with a college education, the age at which fewer than one-quarter still had kids at home was 54.

According to the U.S. actuarial table for 2020, a woman who has made it to age 51 can expect, on average, to live another 31 years. That’s a lot of years with no children at home. That doesn’t mean that their children will no longer have an important place in their lives, of course, but for many of them, it does mean that that place will not be under the same roof. It could also mean that the lives of adults with and without children become more similar once they reach their early 50s. Perhaps they socialize more with one another.

I’ve made the case previously that all the relentless family talk in politics and in other cultural conversations can be alienating to single people who do not have children. I wonder, though, if it is also off-putting to parents whose children are no longer living at home.