Researching the Childfree Community with Drs. Jennifer Watling Neal & Zachary Neal

​​The research on the childfree population is lacking. Drs. Jennifer Watling Neal & Zachary Neal are looking to change that. Working out of Michigan State University they’re the researchers behind one of the most well-known studies on the childfree population to date.

Throughout the conversation they dive into the intricacies of terms like "childfree" versus "childless" and the importance of accurate categorization. Discover the complexities of defining the childfree population, encompassing those who actively choose not to have children. Gain insights into their groundbreaking research framework, which considers circumstances and attitudes in categorization.

Their research has sparked interest and appreciation from those seeking validation of their childfree status. Tune in to challenge stereotypes and promote inclusivity in research and societal dialogue.

Learn more & connect with Drs. Jennifer & Zachary using the links below:

+ Study: One in five adults don’t want children - and they’re deciding early in life

+ Dr. Jennifer Watling Neal 

+ Dr. Zachary Neal

+ Donate to Drs Neal's Childfree Research

The Childfree Wealth Podcast, hosted by Bri Conn and Dr. Jay Zigmont, CFP®, is a financial and lifestyle podcast that explores the unique perspectives and concerns of childfree individuals and couples.

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Transcript

Dr. Jay

Hey Childfree Wealth listeners. Today, I get to nerd out. Okay, and I'm warning you right now, if you don't like nerds in research, just skip this episode. I say that because my wife and I we’re both PhDs. I'm now getting to talk to another set of PhDs and we're going to talk about childfree and research and all that, and it's going to get nerdy.

I'm just warning you. That's not a bad thing. It's just what happens when you put a whole bunch of PhDs in a room. We’ll naturally go deep into research and fun stuff. So today on the podcast we have the doctors Neil. And by the way, if you've ever wondered, there actually is a plural for doctors. You know, it's not Mr. and Mrs. It's doctors. 

My wife, drives her crazy when something gets sent to us and it’s Mr. and Mrs. So doctors Neil, Jenna and Zach. And you've heard me talk about their research before because I've quoted this research you're doing out of Michigan and the numbers of childfree folks and all that before. It's not going to be a surprise. They both are professors of psychology at Michigan State University.

We got to get it right. The right Michigan and the, you know. My wife is from OSU so we can't find those, the Ohio or Michigan battles but we'll get there. But great to have you on the podcast. How are you two doing?

Dr. Zachary

It's great to be here, Jay. I'm really excited to join you.

Dr. Jenna

Yeah, I'm super excited to be here and is a fan of people who are Ohio State fans as well. I'm a big fan of MSU.

00:01:24:05 - 00:01:43:02

Dr. Jay

Yeah. There's always the old school rivalries little say. So Jenna and Zach have been working on childfree and the research around it and I want to start with just asking the simple question: is childfree one word, two words, got a dash in it? What's the correct way to use Childfree? Now, I'm going to tell you, I'm biased.

Just trademarked the term Childfree Wealth, and it's one word. So if you say it's not that I can't change my trademark.

Dr. Jenna

We typically use one word as well. I'll just childfree. No dashes.

Dr. Jay

Well, but the AP style guide says that's wrong.

Dr. Zachary

This is true. To be honest, I'd be happy if people started using childfree with or without a hyphen, with or without a space. If they gave up on using childless as the overarching term for anybody who doesn't have children. You know, one of the things we're trying to get across in some of this work is introducing the word childfree as not a value laden term, not part of a movement, just a descriptive label.

People who don't have kids and don't want kids, you know, if they want to use a hyphen, great. If they don't want to use a hyphen, probably okay too. But the more we see this term come into use as the label that describes this group of people, that would be great.

Dr. Jenna

And it's a lot less of a mouthful than voluntarily childless.

Dr. Jay

Yeah, I actually saw that in one of your articles, talking about the history of it is interesting. We'll come back to that and I wouldn't. When I started company, I did a lot of work with Katy Seppi, who works in more of the childless community. We worked on the terms heavily. In my world, because I work in finances, I say your financial plan changes when you don't have kids and aren’t planning on having kids. 

But “Don't have kids, not planning on having kids” doesn’t work, so we have to use a term. And the discussion we ended up with was using the terms childfree and permanently childless. And the reason we did that was because you could be childless, though the census still says you can be childless and you can have adopted kids and different things. And so you mentioned childfree and childless. How do you separate those two?

Dr. Zachary

When we distinguish, we distinguish childfree people as people who don't have kids and never want kids. And when we mean kids in our work, we include both biological and non-biological children. So they don't want to have biological children of their own, but they also don't want to adopt children. They don't want to foster children. They don't want to marry people who have children to become stepparents.

They don't want to be involved in having or raising children. So that would be childfree. A childless person is a person who doesn't have kids, but they would have liked to have kids. We have still a third category of people who don't have kids and plan to have kids in the future. We call them not yet parents.

Dr. Jenna

Yeah, we even have other categories that we've looked at in our research and folks who are undecided. So they're sort of on the fence about whether they want to have kids or not. There's a lot of different types of people out there when it comes to family statuses.

Dr. Jay

To the people listening, if this sounds like just an academic argument, it's actually a huge discussion. If you’ve listened to my episode about FinCon, I got in a fight with some researchers who ask the question of do you have dependents or not? And said, it's the same as if you have if you're childfree or not. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, not even close.

When I had that fight, I hadn't, didn't have your article in my hand of like, how to ask questions around research, around childfree and how to use the term. So can you walk me through like the framework you set up there? Because it really is important to identify who we are and like, get a good checkbox that then allows us to then do other analysis.

Dr. Zachary

Yeah. So one of the most recent pieces of work we've been working on is trying and you know, like you said, this is a tricky sort of topic to navigate and there's a lot of confusion, a lot of different terms. And so we tried to develop a relatively simple framework to figure out where all these different categories fit in. The sort of top level that the easiest thing we can think about is the first question you'd need to ask someone is: do you have children?

It's pretty easy to figure out. It's very easy for people to answer that question. If they answer, don't know to that question, and sometimes they do in these surveys, that's a whole other situation if they don't know if they have children. So usually it's a yes/no question. If they answer yes, we call them parents. Pretty straightforward.

We can get into sort of finer grained different varieties of parents. But yeah, an answer to the yes I have children makes you a parent. If you say no, then it's where it gets complicated. Because there are lots and lots of varieties of non-parents. And what we've found in our work, is it's just too diverse a group to say parents versus non-parents.

There's so much diversity in the non-parent group. When we're looking at the non-parent group, there's two more things that we have to know about. One is what we call circumstances. Are there barriers to you having children? Barriers could be fertility issues, but it could be economic issues. You know, I'd like to have children, but I can't afford them right now.

It could be trouble finding a suitable partner, all kinds of life and biological circumstances. And then the third question, and this is the one that almost never gets asked on big sort of surveys is the attitude: do you want children? And those three all come together to fit into what we think of as childfree. So a childfree person obviously doesn't already have children and they don't want children.

But at least as we understand, childfree, it's completely irrelevant if there had been any circumstance issues. So you can be childfree even if you're infertile, because if you don't want children, it doesn't really matter if you could have had them or not. That question just isn't really relevant.

Dr. Jay

Well, it may not be relevant in the research, but I've got to challenge you there because I've got to fight with this again. I get in frequent fights if you haven’t figured it out. I’m gonna talk about childfree stuff and all the financial world. And the question somebody in the finance world said, well, I should understand how they got there because it's going to change things. And I go, not really.

Now I'm working with financial therapists and financial therapists, maybe actually there might be a grieving process of a childless so there is, like, some need for that. But I'm kind of following you to say, hey, in the research, like, we got to categorize people. I will say what I'm going to push back on is like trying to be more inclusive and saying the terms childfree and childless people self-select and does using the term childfree, I don't know, disengage people who want to use the childless term or see that for themselves.

Dr. Zachary

Yeah, it's, it's a great question. We haven't really studied how people choose what term they use for themselves. Some people may be childfree according to how we define the term, but they prefer to use the label childless or they prefer to use the label voluntarily childless. Or maybe they prefer no label at all. That becomes a really complicated issue: how people would describe their own situation.

But like you said, for the sake of research, we come up with a set of labels that we sort of define in a certain way so that we have a way of talking about these folks. But yeah, you're absolutely right. People may choose different labels for themselves.

Dr. Jenna

Yeah. And there are actually a couple of surveys out there, I think mostly not in the US where they've asked directly to try to identify childfree people. Just ask if they identify as childfree. And I think our prevalence rates that we get from our three questions that we ask would probably be lower or if we ask directly if people are childfree because a lot of people that would kind of qualify based on our kind of definition, based on circumstance, attitude and behavior, might not necessarily identify with that label.

Dr. Jay

It's funny, I was talking with our chief marketing officer and one of the challenges we have is people don't know to Google “I don't have kids, and how does that impact my wealth”? Well, they don't know to Google “Childfree and wealth” or like, and I had somebody I did an article and they said I didn't know that term was me, but that's me and that's my life.

I was like, okay, and the best I heard, so this once again comes back from where Katy's doing. Her argument is we should just have a different word that doesn't include the word kids in there, essentially. Like we should have an identity that is not about having or not having kids and I was like, ooh, that's good, but I have no clue where to go with that.

So I'm just going throw that in your lap and say maybe that should be some future research. Well, you know, maybe it doesn't fit, but, all right. So in the preamble for this, I ask people for interviews, anything you want me to talk about or don’t. And you said, well, you know, we don't talk about us, and we don't use the term childfree for us as a couple for reasons.

Can you talk about your reasons?

Dr. Zachary

Well, when we talk to people about this work and this is, this is relatively newer line of work for the two of us. We've been researching the childfree population for, what, about four years now, but it's a hot topic. People like talking to us about it. They like getting engaged. And every now and then they'll ask us, are you childfree?

And we tend not to answer that question because we're trying to keep the research focused on the childfree population that we're studying. It's not about us. We're not certainly not trying to encourage people to be childfree or to become parents. We really have no stake in whether someone wants kids, has kids. We think people should be able to make those sorts of decisions for themselves.

We tend to avoid answering those sorts of questions about our own personal choices, because that's not really what, what we want the research and the focus to be on.

Dr. Jenna

Yeah, we really want to put the research front and center and not have that attention be focused on that, says the researchers. We've kind of pushed back on that question a little bit.

Dr. Jay

I don't blame you. I have more people praying for my soul than I know what to do with. And like, it goes down paths. I'm in the South and you say you're childfree in the South, I mean, it comes with some stigma. And I know you looked at some of these questions on, you know, warmness and connection. And I wonder, frankly, is it an issue that we can't even publicly say, hey, we're childfree without skewing the conversation?

And I've had this, I've done press and I’m like, and they’re like, go down a path now because I've said I'm childfree. You know, I had somebody I went to buy software for my company and I'm buying something from them. They said, who do you serve? I said, I seve childfree people. They said, oh, you hate kids? And I'm like, what in the world?

Like, where does that come from? But that's just that reaction. Tell me kind of like, what's the research say about like, like are we childfree, like pariahs or how does this work?

Dr. Jenna

Yeah, in our research, so there's a lot of really great qualitative research out there and other researchers have done that have really shown that childfree people are oftentimes sort of overtly stigmatized for being childfree and experience things like discrimination. And our study is we've looked at sort of more subtle things like interpersonal warmth, looked at people's sort of warmth, ratings towards childfree individuals and parents.

And we found that parents and other types of non-parents felt substantial, really less warm towards childfree individuals than they felt towards each other or towards other parents. And additionally, parents tend to feel very, very warm towards other parents. So they have a very strong preference towards other parents. And so even if they're not being sort of overtly discriminatory, that could mean that childfree people might just kind of get left out because parents tend to gravitate towards other parents.

There is sort of both the overt discrimination that other people have talked about, but also the sort of more insidious kind of preference issue that might lead childfree people to get left out socially.

Dr. Jay

In my words, so I'm going to go to the inverse and say they're cold towards us. If you're gonna go on the warm side. I mean, and it's not always the case and you're doing a lot of work out of Michigan, and I would really wonder state by state being in the Deep South, especially in a post-bro world, it's gotten interesting. And it's actually gotten dangerous in some cases. Being cold could literally mean like, being ostracized and a few others, of those other things. And then I've said that the people like they'll be in California like, where? Like, I don't see that like, you know, I’m like, different worlds. And I don't know what to do with that data. So okay, cool. We found out that they're more warm towards each other, towards parents. So what does that mean?

Dr. Zachary

You know, we've been thinking about that a lot. We think that one of the things it means is that, when, say, institutions are run primarily by parents, parents are the largest group in our population. They may not necessarily have negative feelings towards childfree people. And in fact, our data suggests that they don't have overtly negative feelings towards childfree people, but their feelings are so much warmer toward other parents.

And this is something we see in all kinds of things. We like people who are similar to ourselves more than we like other people. That effect is so strong for parents that it may feel like childfree people are being excluded or ostracized when in fact all that's really happening is parents can identify more with other parents. They have more in common to the extent that they're setting the agenda for schools, the way towns are built, you know, really sort of anything.

They may take the perspective of a parent or of children and prioritize those needs over other needs, not because they dislike childfree people, but because they sort of get where parents are coming from much more readily and feel sort of more in tune with that.

Dr. Jay

I'm wondering if that makes it, and, I've been working on this argument for my company, and one of the arguments of making is, hey, there's a value of having childfree people provide services to other childfree people because they understand them. They get the warmth that comes with that. I've actually tracked a number of my initial consultation meetings.

How many times people end up in tears because it's just like the first time they felt heard, and other things. So if I follow your data out, if it comes to like, hey, I want to find a, there's actually a group right now working on, hey I want a therapist for childfree or childress folks. If I want to find somebody that understands me, connects with me, that might actually be a great selection criteria, essentially, of saying, hey, finding somebody that understands you is going to be more warm to you.

Dr. Zachary

Yeah that, that could be. I mean, you'd at least have a reason to expect that you're sort of going into something on the same page, at least with some piece of of your your life situation is probably no guarantee that they're going to agree with you. But it it gives you that extra, extra piece of commonality that probably gives you a bit of a leg up.

Dr. Jay

Before I'm going to go to numbers in a second. But you're opening a can of worms with a lot of these questions. Let's just be honest of this. Like, you know, we're we're asking questions. I consider the childfree population an underserved, underrepresented population kind of joke line. But it's true. I'm like, Hey, I'm a cis hetero white male who's a minority because that's kind of because you're checking that box and like it is a little, let's call it dangerous, a little edgy to be in this research area.

Dr. Jay

Why did you two take that chance?

Dr. Jenna

Well, we were really interested in this topic, partly because we saw sort of a gap in the research. Really. There were some great qualitative studies out there of childfree experiences, but far fewer quantitative studies that had large representative samples. And the quantitative studies we did see typically lumped childfree adults in with all other types of non-parents that we've already talked about.

So people who were planning to have kids in the future, people who were childless and can't have kids but really wanted them. And so, there was just a huge need for somebody to start looking at this literature and really trying to identify childfree people and also look at the prevalence of childfree people. I think even though we're childfree people are in the minority, our data sort of suggests that they're a pretty big minority.

So being able to show that, gosh, you know, even even though there's not as many childfree people vs. parents, there's a pretty big group of childfree people out there that are underserved.

Dr. Jay

And we're going to come to the numbers in a second cause I'm going to I'm going to ask you 14 questions on that. But I'm just having these nightmares of my Ph.D. committee going over and over and over saying a gap in the research is not a reason to do research. There might be a question that's not answered and it's not answered for a reason.

Like when I started my company, I kind of did the same thing. I was like, nobody serving childfree folks from a financial standpoint. I'm going to go into this, but I might be going into an area that isn't served for a reason. So like, how do you say you're going into the unknown and saying, let me poke at this.

Did your department all laugh at you for doing this? Or I mean, how was the reception of it?

Dr. Zachary

The reception has been been pretty variable. I mean, I suppose when when we first started doing this, it wasn't specifically to sort of dive head headstrong into researching the childfree. We saw that the demographic literature and most of the time when when you get these big demographic surveys, you decide a segment of the population to serve. You've got parents and you've got non-parents.

And we started to realize doing research on a group of people called non-parents just makes no sense at all because there's like doing research on parents, okay? They have something in common. They've all got kids and there's stuff you have to do when you have kids. But lumping all the non-parents into one category, like, the only thing they have in common is that they don't have kids.

Dr. Zachary

But that doesn't actually that's not a common thing to have in common. There's a lot of different kinds of non-parents. Our work has has tended to focus on that childfree group of non-parents. But really more broadly, we're trying to blow out that group to highlight, there's lots of different kinds of non-parents. They're different. They require finding, you know, asking different kinds of survey questions.

They have different life needs. We've been focusing on the childfree because among the non-parents, it's the biggest group. There's a huge number of them and there was nobody writing about it. And so we thought it was really an interesting group. But like you said, it gets mixed, mixed reactions, sort of traditional demography has been slower to catch on to this.

They do parents versus non-parents sometimes they'll talk about childless people as an umbrella category. But when we share this work sort of more generally, it's not common that we'll get an email from a childfree person that says, I thought I was the only person like this, and I read your research and find out there's millions of us.

I feel validated. I feel seen. Thanks for doing this work. And so it really depends on who's seeing it. The kind of reaction we get.

Dr. Jay

I’m with you.Whenever people ask me why I ended up in this area, I jokingly said it was true, I was researching to see how weird my wife and I are. Now, by the way, we're two PhDs who are childfree. We're weird by nature. Okay? We sit around the dinner table, talking about research studies, you do actually do them together.

Okay? Like you guys got us beat, but, you know, like, we're trying to figure out how weird we are and like, there's lots of us out there. We’re weird for other reasons, but like, we're normal within the subset of childfree folks. And I've been working through this and I do a bunch of press and people will ask me, okay, well what percentage of the US is childfree?

The best data I have is yours. But I struggle on how to say it to somebody in general, because like, just whether or not Michigan is representative and blah blah blah. You are on some big morning show and they ask you what percentage of the US is childfree? What is or do you give?

Dr. Jenna

What we would typically say is that in our research we have found that about one in five people are childfree in Michigan. Our study just focused on adults in Michigan. So we don't necessarily know whether that would generalize to the US population. However, Michigan's population is very similar to the US population in terms of all kinds of demographic characteristics, in terms of age, race, education, income and politics.

So we do think our findings might apply more broadly. We don't know for certain, but we think it might apply more broadly.

Dr. Jay

And if I'm following the data right, it looks like that number’s up after Dobbs.

Dr. Jenna

It is. We saw a jump from about one in 5 to 26% immediately post Dobbs. And we're not certain with the passage of Prop 3 here whether we would have seen that drop back down after that once reproductive rights were enshrined in the state constitution here in Michigan or whether that was something that was a more permanent jump.

Dr. Jay

Yeah. And when I'm talking about your research, because of the people I'm talking to, I’m talking about our financial people about people who don't have kids, I tend to lump in childfree and childless from your original research and kind of going, it's 25% ish and kind of go one in four ish and they usually push back and the first thing they say they'll give me is that what they said today. They're changing their minds. And I will go, no, first of all, my research, other research says they got people sterilizing at 21. And really post Dobbs. The number of people who got sterilized, it went through the roof. I mean, it's just it's just an insane increase. What do you say to the people say, hey, well, they'll change their minds. Let's just tackle that one.

Dr. Jenna

Yeah, well, in our studies, we actually, we have at least a couple of studies where we looked at retrospectively, we weren't able to track it over time, but we did ask people when they made the decision to be childfree. And the most common answer was in their twenties, this is very young and these are people who are currently in their forties on average.

And so at least people are reporting that they're deciding quite young and not changing their minds. So we don't have any evidence of people kind of shifting from identifying as childfree to later on becoming parents down the road.

Dr. Jay

I'm with you. And I think all the, every other study I've read has said essentially the same thing. It's just an assumption that, well, they're young kids, they don't know what they're doing. You know, things you know, things will change. And my argument is, yeah, it's going to change. And actually more people are saying they're going to be childfree.

Have you seen much in the data? In like, the younger generations, the percentage of childfree versus the older generations.

Dr. Zachary

You know, we've often thought we've sort of a hypothesis and everybody expects, you know, younger people are going to be more likely to identify as childfree than, than older folks. And we actually haven't seen that sort of difference. And it actually makes us wonder if it's maybe not so much an age thing as it's becoming more acceptable to identify as childfree. Now. That there were always childfree people out there, there were always a lot of childfree people out there. But 20, 30 years ago, they were more reluctant to say so, and now we're able to see them. So the folks that are in their fifties and sixties that are childfree may not have been comfortable saying so in a survey 30 years ago.

Now we can see it. And so it could be that we're just getting a more faithful depiction of how many childfree people there are out there and there's not a huge age difference.

Dr. Jay

So but we are seeing other data: fertility rates going down in the younger generations. If we follow that path, and those are all average numbers that I hate. Like, I mean, like they're lumping together way too many groups. I just feel like there's a reasonable assumption that just from the attitudes and beliefs and what you're seeing from people that the Gen Y, Gen Z are more and more like, hey, I can't afford to have a kid.

And we did research on why people choose to be childfree or not. They're like, hey, I don't want to pass on my medical issues, the environment, the politics. I mean, all these reasons I struggle. If you can try, you know, if we're going to say it's, you know, we're just getting a better reading on it and the total percentage is not growing.

I'm going, I don't know that I believe that. But you’ve got the better research. So I mean, like where am I off on my assumptions?

Dr. Zachary

Well, you're probably right. It continues to be our hypothesis that younger people are more likely to be childfree. I think part of the challenge is that the difference may not be huge yet, and so it's difficult to detect statistically. It might be a while before it's a big enough difference that we can really see that. The other challenges, you know, frequently when we talk about this work, somebody will ask us, well, what about birth rate statistics?

And there's a bunch of differences between birth rate statistics which get talked about a lot and the sort of thing we're doing. So one difference is birth rate stats are about whether people have kids or don't have kids. We mostly aren't interested in that. We're instead what people want to people want kids or not want kids, which is not a behavior or a biological thing.

It's an attitude. And so that's one thing that makes our research a bit different from birth rates and a little trickier to study. It requires asking different sorts of questions, but the other thing that makes it difficult to compare our findings with birth rate stats is we could see birth rate stats. Fertility rates come down by people having fewer kids.

Even if they don't have zero kids. It's a little difficult to line up declines in fertility with increases in the number of childfree people. They're definitely going to be related, but it's not going to be a 1 to 1 connection.

Dr. Jay

The fight I was getting into with researchers doing financial research on using the term childfree is they argued that they're asking a question about current state, do you have dependents or not? And they're saying childfree is a future state. Do you plan on having kids? And I went, ugh, my brain's hurting. Like, I don't know, great. Like, like I'm like, I don't…

How do you, how would you address it? Give me some words to address that. With like like I'm over here working with the financial, because what I ultimately want, you know, usually what you do is like, actual stats about net worth and income and all that, vs. child free vs. not, which don't exist because we're not asking the question, right.

But like this future state versus current state and whether or not child free gets that, how do we get there?

Dr. Jenna

Yeah, I don't really think that childfree is a future state because that would suggest that they're planning to do something. But these are people who have said, I don't want to have kids ever. Right? So they're sort of in a final state of decision making, unless you are of the mindset that you think people are going to change their minds, that we already talked about, which doesn't necessarily happen.

It is pretty much a state that is current for people. Not future. Now, not yet parents, I would say, people who are planning to have kids in the future, that's a future state. And I still think that would be interesting from a financial standpoint for people to understand that people are planning to have kids. So I don't understand why they wouldn't be interested in future states anyway.

But I really don't think that childfree is that, be, a future state.

Dr. Jay

By the way, if your ears were ringing, I literally was quoting your research. I'm like, listen, they're like, well, we don't have data to know that it's a big enough group that we should segment out. And I'm like, Well, you ask about gender, you ask about all different types of things. I'm going, your gender question has changed over time to be more of a continuum.

It's just not a binary, not a just a male female. Well, the child question should be a continuum also, and that was just my words of it. But, you know, I'm like, hey, it’s a big group. And the thing I ended up saying to them is, I was, I apologize if I was too estimating or overestimating or stuff, but like, look, in the same study in Michigan, I think it was like 7.9% was LGBTQ plus. The childfree population is almost triple the size and they were like, well, I don't believe that.

I'm like, okay. I mean, my question that is, all right, the LGBTQ community is very well known. It exists. It's, I'm not say accepted, but it's it's acknowledged. Yet the childfree community if we're multiples of the size, are hidden. Any thoughts of why?

Dr. Zachary

That's a really good question. I mean, we could try and speculate. I mean, one possibility is that nobody's been asking about whether people are childfree in surveys. There's a handful of surveys that sometimes in a roundabout way, maybe you can eke out whether people are childfree, but for the most part, those questions just aren't on there. And so, we didn't know and we sort of, you know, everybody assumed it was a relatively uncommon, pretty rare group.

It's only recently that we've realized, wow, there's there's an enormous amount of people here. Another possibility is that it's not a very cohesive group because the thing they have in common is not having something. And it's easier to get people banding together on an issue if they have something in common because they do something or because they want something.

But the absence of doing something and the absence of wanting something doesn't have that sort of power of bringing people together as much as if it had been the other way around. And so it could just be that there's a huge number of childfree people and they're all doing their own thing because they, the only thing that unites them is not doing something, which is sort of.

Dr. Jenna

But I also wonder if, as it gains more attention in the media and especially, I think within the last ten years, I've heard more conversations about childfree people, than I had in, like, the rest of my life. Right? So I think as it becomes more recognized, it is becoming more of a social identity. So I wonder if I'll see a little bit of a shift as more people start to identify us as being childfree.

Dr. Jay

Well, and I think the terms we use matter. This week, it seems to be that DINK’s are the popular one on social media. And I draw a line between DINK’s and DINKY’s. No kids yet versus never. And like, and like in and I'm trying to talk to, you know, different press and everything and I'm like, try to explain the difference and they get lost.

They're kind of like, yeah, whatever. And you have to give it at some point. And I don't know. I mean, I think you're doing the right thing. So where are you going with this research next? Like, I don't want to like scoop you, but like so you've asked percentages in Michigan. We've looked at pre/post Dobbs, we've looked at how to define it.

Where do we go?

Dr. Zachary

We're interested in a couple different directions. I mean, we've looked at Dobbs, but this issue of reproductive rights and reproductive health, this is something we think is going to keep evolving and so we'd like to keep an eye on that because we don't really…when we started the study about the pre/post Dobbs, we didn't know that Roe was going to be overturned.

We didn't know about the Dobbs decision that just sort of happened. And so we had a chance to look at it. And so by the same token, we have no idea what's going to happen in November. Something's going to happen, and we think it's going to have some implications. We're keeping an eye on that. But we're also trying to move this work outside of just Michigan and outside of just the United States, because, we're curious, if there's this many childfree people in Michigan, there might be a lot of people around the world. We've started looking at it in places like in Japan. So Japan, we all know that they've had a sort of fertility population crisis there for a long time. That means that they collect really, really good demographic data, way better than than we get in the United States. So we get, we can get a much more detailed portrait about what's going on there.

We're also interested in how this is playing out in the developing world, where fertility issues and fertility control and autonomy are much more complicated. And so what we're interested in, are their child…is this childfree population emerging in those places, too? So we're, we're really trying to push this outside of just Michigan, where we got started.

Dr. Jay

And I have seen and I think it was you, Zach we're doing some kind of informal AMA after this is posted on Reddit. You mentioned that your funding was really just kind of like a starter grant from the department or something like that. And somebody asked, well, can we send money to  your grant? And I'm like, yeah, let's do a Kickstarter to like, move this research.

And, I’m not sure, can we do a Kickstarter of grant research? I'm like, I'm all for it. But like, can we as a childfree community actually help you do stuff or, do you got any ideas there?

Dr. Zachary

Yeah. So this this is something we're looking into right now. You know, we work for a nonprofit, Michigan State University. In principle, we should be able to receive donations to help support this work because as you've mentioned a couple of times, this is not the most popular topic. It's not something that people like hearing about. It's difficult to get funding.

And so we're trying to explore sort of alternate angles, nontraditional angles for research funding. We're definitely looking at that. But we also just love hearing from childfree people. And so anything that we may be haven't thought of that we should be asking about this population, things that the population, the community wants to know about itself. We are always open to new ideas.

Dr. Jay

Well, when you come up with the donation, the Go Fund Me, the Kickstarter, the something for research, you let me know. Well, we'll be sure to share it because I think we need to. I think we need to do that. And if you two want to do the work, well the rest of us can pony up money so we can just get the research, I don't know.

We'll have to figure out the politics of a university. If, those who haven't been in a university. It sounds like real simple to do something like that. It is a giant nightmare because there is a grants office that is not had a new thought in the past 100 years. And I don't know your grants office, but I'm sure it is the same as every university I've ever been at.

So where can they follow you? Like catch up on the research? Reach out to you.

Dr. Zachary

So we both have personal websites that have dedicated pages for this childfree work and we keep those updated. It's important for us because we're studying this community. All of our research papers are always free to download. You're never going to hit a paywall. Never, you know, to any of your listeners, if they're interested in research, never, never pay a publisher's fee to download a research article.

Never, never do that. Send an email to the researcher or Google it and they will be happy to send it to you for free. And so we keep everything online for folks to find it.

Dr. Jenna

Yeah, it'll either be in a preprint form or we also try to publish open access whenever we possibly can for that reason so that folks can access our work.

Dr. Jay

Yeah, I literally found their website. There is some of the work on Dobbs and I’m like, can I talk about this yet? I mean, where is it? Like, really, you know.

Dr. Jenna

And we're very excited that that paper just came out last week. And so we're excited to get the word out about how these decisions are affecting people.

Dr. Jay

Yeah. And just for context, we're recording in January, so it'll air after. But you know, it's just been one of those discussions and it's awesome. So thank you very much for being here. Next time we have something fun, you're going to have to reach out because we're going to dive into the next research area. And by the way, when you get the GoFundMe or something, we're going to include that link.

So, you know, we can yeah, I don't know if we have a lot of money, but at least we can find some people to start sending you something.

Dr. Zachary

That sounds great, Jay. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks a lot. Yeah.

Dr. Jenna

Yeah. Thanks so much.