Data Viz: Who Thinks It’s Bad if Americans Have Fewer Children?

A year ago the Pew Research Center published, “What do Americans think about fewer people choosing to have children?” One of the findings was this: “Almost half of all U.S. adults (47%) say fewer people choosing to have children in the future would have a negative impact on the country, according to a separate spring 2024 survey.” They broke down that finding by gender, age, family income, and party identification.

The analysis used the American Trends Panel, a sample of people Pew surveys over and over. They also shared the micro data (as they do!), here: https://www.pewresearch.org/dataset/american-trends-panel-wave-148/. That allowed me to look at a few more variables, and also do a multivariate analysis.

Here I analyze the question, “What type of impact do you think it would have on our country if fewer people chose to have children in the future?” The answers range from 1 (very positive) to 5 (very negative), with 3 being neither positive nor negative. Pew combined very negative and somewhat negative. The figure below treats the variable as continuous, just to use all the variation. There are some interesting differences when you look at the people who think it would be “very positive” if people had fewer children (young leftists) and “very negative” (old conservatives and religious people), but mostly the different ways of slicing produce similar results. My Stata code for this is available here.

Results from a combined OLS model, using marginal effects at the means are in the figure below: The strongest divide on the question is ideological: conservatives think it would be very bad, liberals are more neutral. Almost as strong is religious attendance, which church-goers almost as upset as conservatives. Men are also more negative than women, and married or partnered people more negative than single people. Older people, richer people and those with higher education are also more negative. Whites and Asians are the most concerned, too, but I didn’t include that in the figure. No group has less than a 3.0 average, which would mean a positive take on falling births.