Are pets replacing kids in Korea?

February 13, 2024

SEOUL – I must confess that I have always had cats. I have no children. However, at least for me, my cats were not a cause or consequence of a child-free life. My husband and I both love cats and we cannot imagine our lives without our furry family members in our household.

In fact, our lives with our non-human companions are typical of the average American household. In 2022, the US Census Bureau reported that 70 percent of US households included pets. In contrast, the proportion of households with children under 18 dropped from 48 percent in 2002 to 40 percent by 2022. In South Korea, the difference between the two is similar, but households with pets and/or children are far from ubiquitous. About 30 percent of Korean households reported having at least one pet in 2020, while 23 percent of Korean households included children.

For both the US and South Korea, there is an upward trend in the proportion of households with pets and a downward trend in the shares of households with children. There are many stories of primary schools being shut down and the sales of pet strollers outpacing those of baby strollers in South Korea. In the US, there are occasional articles about the risk to small colleges from the shrinking size of the college population. Of course, this is happening at a much faster pace in South Korea.

If you’re reading this article, I suspect you already know that South Korea currently has the lowest birth rate in the world, at 0.78. In contrast, that rate in the US is 1.66. Replacement level fertility is approximately 2.1, which roughly means that women have to have, on average, 2.1 children in their lifetime for the population to maintain its size. When I was in graduate school in Chicago