America has some serious daddy issues.
The number of young men who are interested in having kids is on the decline, according to new research published in Journal of Marriage and Family.
The study’s author, Robert Bozick, collected data from three different sources — the National Survey of Family Growth, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and a study called “Monitoring the Future” — looking at more than 40,000 young American men over two decades.
According to one of the data sets, the number of male high school seniors who say they never want kids has more than tripled between 2000 and 2019.
And, more broadly, men’s desire to have kids has significantly declined. Between 2012 and 2018, the percentage of childless men ages 15 to 49 responding that they did not want children doubled from 9.9% to 20.2%. In addition, the number of men concerned with parental leave policies when evaluating jobs decreased between 2005 and 2015.
“A growing share of childless men do not want children and … increasingly, a lack of children would not bother them at all,” Bozick writes in the study, though he goes on to note that the majority of men still say they want to have kids.
Bozick associated the findings with broader socioeconomic shifts in the country.
“We’ve seen stagnating rates of labor force participation. We’ve seen young men being outpaced by young women in terms of college enrollment and completion, and more recently, we’ve seen a spike in young men living at home with parents,” he told The Post. “We’ve seen a slower transition to adulthood bought on by changes in the broader economy.”
Gabriel Wilson, 24, who lives in Atlanta, realized he didn’t want to have kids after he graduated from college, and he took a job working in a restaurant while pursuing his career as a freelance writer.
He dreams of writing a novel, and is reluctant to sideline his work for fatherhood. His girlfriend also doesn’t want kids.
“I very much value my time and my hobbies. Over time, I’ve started to not see the appeal [of having kids] in terms of how it would affect my life,” Wilson told The Post. “You can chase a career if you want, but at the end of the day [if you have kids] you have to provide for someone else.”