Who wants to have children?
Easing into the debate on declining fertility rates
Fertility rates in Canada (and around the world) are declining. Statistics Canada recently confirmed that Canada’s fertility rate had reached “a new record-low in 2023.” The agency reported that:
“Canada's rate has been generally declining for over 15 years and reached a new low in 2023 of 1.26 children per woman… Canada has now joined the group of "lowest-low" fertility countries, including South Korea, Spain, Italy and Japan, with 1.3 children per woman or less.”
Here’s the chart from Statistics Canada that accompanies its report.
Source: Statistics Canada, Fertility indicators, provinces and territories: Interactive dashboard.
Why are fewer younger Canadian adults having children? There are many plausible answers. Maybe it’s the high cost of living in general, or the high cost of housing or of child care in particular. Maybe it’s the penalties mothers face in terms of earnings and advancement in the workplace. Maybe it’s the fact that young adults are staying single longer. Maybe it’s the reluctance to bring children into a world full of conflicts and climate disasters. Maybe young adults these days are just too busy (or possibly too self-centred?).1
This is a new topic for the Environics Institute. We don’t have earlier data to compare to, so we can’t report on how interest in having children has changed over time. But we do have recent survey results (in this first case, thanks to YMCA Canada) that shed some light on the question of who is more or less interested in having children at this moment in time.
This is the first in what I expect to be a series of articles on the subject of young adults’ interest in having children and their parenting experiences. This first instalment is based on responses from a survey conducted with YMCA Canada in 2024. In-depth analysis of the data was conducted by Hubert Cadieux, a master’s student at Université Laval. My thanks to YMCA Canada for funding the survey and to Hubert for his collaboration and expertise.
Let’s start with the most general question: what proportion of younger Canadian adults are interested in having children? We put this question to people between the ages of 18 and 44, who do not already have children.
Overall, 63 percent of Canadians in this situation say they would definitely or probably like to have children, compared to 31 percent who say they probably or definitely would not. The proportion that would like to have children is a little higher for men (66%) than for women (60%). Among men (age 18 to 44 who are not parents), 28 percent say they probably or definitely would not like to have children; the figure is a little higher for women (35%).
It’s tempting to jump right away to consider whether it’s alarming that 31 percent of younger Canadians don’t want to have children.2 But let’s not, because that figure is, on its own, a bit misleading – its leaves out of view the fact that the question is only asked of people who do not already have children. While 31 percent of adults under age 45 who are not already parents say they don’t want to have children, the proportion of all adults in this age group who hold this view is only 19 percent. Here’s how the results look if we take everyone into consideration, and not just those who don’t yet have children in their care.
Overall, then, about one in five Canadian adults under the age of 45 do not intend to have children (note that the proportions are similar for women and men3). Now we can consider in more detail who is more or less likely to express this preference.
Age and relationship status
The first factor that is related to the intention to have children is age. Once people get past their early 30s, the proportion that has had children naturally goes up, while the proportion that has not but would still like to goes down. The remainder – that is, the proportion not wanting to have children – rises, but only a little. Among non-parents age 18 to 34, 16 percent say they would not like to have children; among those age 35 to 44, the figure reaches 22 percent.
Much more important than age is relationship status: whether a person is part of a couple (and if so, whether they are married).
Only six percent of married adults (age 18 to 44) do not want to have children, compared to 19 percent of those who are part of a common-law couple, and 29 percent of those who are single (and never married). The result for people who are single likely reflects a combination of preference and (lack of) opportunity: some simply do not wish to be part of a family with children; some don’t see a future with kids because they have not been able to find a suitable partner.
The second scenario likely becomes more important with age. The proportion of single adults who don’t want to have children is only 21 percent for those age 18 to 34, but 48 percent for those age 35 to 44. This is relevant, because, over time, the proportion of adults in their 30s in Canada who are not living as part of a couple has been rising (see Part 3 of this paper prepared for YMCA Canada on the demographic trends shaping the country’s future).
Financial pressures
The next factors to consider are the economic ones: is the desire to have children related to financial security? Perhaps surprisingly, this does not seem to be the case – at least not unequivocally, and not in the way many might expect.
Here are the results based on how people feel about the adequacy of their income:
And here’s what it looks like, depending on whether people are having difficulty paying their rent or mortgage each month:
In neither case do people facing financial difficulty appear less likely to want to have children.
In making this observation, we are not denying the obvious: that many young adults are facing an affordability crisis. But the survey findings suggest that a concern about financial security is not what differentiates those who do want to have children in the future from those who do not.4 People (between the ages of 18 and 44 who do not have children) who are worried about their household income or their ability to pay for housing are no less likely to say they would like to have children than their more financially secure counterparts.
This finding is important enough that we extended our analysis to confirm it. First, we expanded the number of measures of financial security we considered: along with the questions about adequacy of household income and ability to pay for housing, we took into consideration household income level and expectations for personal finances over the next six months. Then we tested the relationship of each (separately and together) to the question about interest in having children, while controlling for age, gender and relationship status. We confirmed that greater economic insecurity does not consistently coincide with less interest in having children to a statistically significant extent. Only one of the four measures shows this relationship (greater insecurity correlating with less interest); however, in two cases, there is a significant relationship but in the opposite direction (greater insecurity correlating with greater interest). In particular, once all the controls are in place, concern about paying for housing actually correlates with slightly greater interest in having children. This might occur, for instance, because people wishing to start a family might take on more costly housing than those planning to keep living on their own.
Our first article on this topic therefore ends with this conclusion: if you’re concerned that too few young adults are planning to have children, you need to look at issues beyond that of the cost of living.
But we’re just getting started. This is only one survey – the first of several we are working with. And there are many other possible factors to explore, beyond age, relationship status and financial security, that could affect people’s interest in having children. Some of those will be the focus of the next part in this series… coming soon!
The data in this post are from the YMCA in Canada 2024 survey, conducted by the Environics Institute for Survey Research and YMCA Canada. The survey was conducted online with a representative sample of 2,200 adults Canadians between January 25 and February 2, 2024. The data are weighted by age, gender, region and education to ensure alignment with the actual composition of the Canadian population, based on the 2021 census. The authors would like to thank YMCA Canada for making this data available to them for this analysis. The authors remain solely responsible for the results and interpretation presented here.
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Cover photo credit: Yan Krukau
For an overview of the issue in an international context, see this recent episode of “The Economics Show” podcast, featuring Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch’s interview of economist Alice Evans.
Again, we can’t say, based on our survey, whether the proportions that would or would not like to have children in 2024 are higher or lower than in earlier years.
What does differ between women and men is the proportion in this age group who are already parents (which is partly a function of the age differences in an important proportion of relationships).
Also, this doesn’t mean that those facing financial hardship won’t ultimately be less likely to realize their goal of having children. Again, it just means that if we ask what the difference is at one point in time between non-parents who do and those who do not want to have children in the future, financial security does not seem to be a key part of the answer.
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Start of an interesting and useful series.