Michigan ranks No. 2 in nation for ‘childfree’ adults, study finds
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LANSING, Mich. (News 10) – A new study finds Michigan ranks second in the nation for “childfree” adults, people who don’t have kids and don’t want them.
Michigan State University psychology professor Zachary Neal co-authored the research. He said roughly 1 in 5 Michigan adults fit that description, trailing only California.
“Around 20% of people in Michigan, along with California and New Hampshire, don’t want to have kids,” Neal said. “At the opposite of the spectrum, it goes down to only around 10% of people in places like Louisiana and North Dakota, South Dakota.”
Neal said it’s not a coastal or big city trend, and it’s not fully explained by economics, according to his research.
“This has been a relatively hidden population, stigmatized population, but there’s a lot of them,” Neal said. “It doesn’t seem to be a regional effect. It really seems to boil down to a very personal decision.”
Couple describes their decision
Rachel Fredrickson and Robin Malcolm, a childfree couple, said they made the decision early on in their relationship.
“We’ve been together for 13 years, married for six,” they said. “I just love it. We travel all the time. I like that we can just, at the drop of a hat, go do whatever.”
Fredrickson and Malcolm said watching friends struggle financially, on top of their own tight budget, helped reinforce their decision.
“We met working at Walmart, and as you can imagine, you make no money working there,” they said. “A lot of people that we see who are our age, who have children… we see them struggling on a daily basis with their relationship, with finances, with just being able to work on themselves. We just didn’t really want our lives to be like that.”
Neal said researchers are still trying to understand exactly what’s driving the trend in Michigan.
Fredrickson and Malcolm said if they ever change their minds about having a child, they would choose to adopt.
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