The story writes itself, which is the first sign to be suspicious of it. Birth rates are falling. Pet ownership is climbing. Therefore millennials are having puppies instead of babies, and somewhere a demographer is clutching his head.
The numbers are real. The causal arrow is backwards. When you actually read what people say when researchers ask them why, they are not describing a preference. They are describing a price.
The trend, as reported
More than half of American households have a dog. Pet adoption surged during the pandemic, when a national anxiety event turned out to be the most effective adoption marketing campaign ever run.
Over the same stretch, the human birth rate went the other way, hitting historic lows and continuing to slide.
That collision produced a genuinely interesting survey. Lily Velez, head of digital PR at Veterinarians.org, has said the team’s starting question was blunt: with adoptions skyrocketing during the pandemic, were pets standing in for children among millennials? The resulting report, “As Birth Rates in US Plummet, Are Pets Standing in for Children?”, found that 70 percent of respondents did view their dog or cat as their child.
That is a striking number, and it is the one everybody quotes. It is also not evidence of substitution. It is evidence of attachment, which is a different claim.
What the same survey says two paragraphs later
Look at the women who said they do not plan to have children.
46 percent said they just do not want to raise a child, which is a real and legitimate answer and, notably, is less than half. The rest gave reasons that have nothing to do with wanting a dog instead. A politically unstable climate. Environmental concerns. Economic instability, including the long psychic hangover of the 2008 recession, which hit this generation in exactly the years people usually start building. 42 percent said the pandemic itself hardened their decision not to have kids.
Velez’s framing of the broader pattern is fair: millennials have been pushing back against the traditional milestones for years, home ownership and marriage among them, and parenthood was becoming one more thing being delayed or dropped.
Notice that every item on that list is a constraint, not a taste. Nobody said “I chose a labradoodle instead.”
Why a pet is what fits in the gap
Once you stop reading this as a preference and start reading it as a budget, the pet makes obvious sense.
You can leave a pet alone for a workday. Daycare for a dog is easier to find and cheaper than daycare for a child. Pets are genuinely expensive, and they are still nowhere near the financial mass of a kid, and then a teenager. You do not have to reorganize your career, your apartment, your relationship, and your social life around one.
And pets do a substantial amount of the emotional work. A large body of research links pet ownership to better mental health, which is not a small thing for a generation that has spent its adult life in a rolling series of crises.
That is not a substitute child. That is the largest amount of love and responsibility a person can take on when the full-size version is out of financial reach.
“People describe their pet as their kid because the attachment system does not have a separate setting for animals,” says Dr. Nina Kohl. “It is the same machinery. What the surveys keep finding is not people choosing an easier love. It is people finding somewhere to put the love they already have.”
The tell: they behave like parents anyway
Here is the part of the report that quietly demolishes the “selfish millennial” reading.
Pet parents in the survey reported making real concessions for their animals. They choose where they live around the animal, weighing dog-friendly outdoor space as a factor in a housing decision. They take out loans to pay for veterinary treatment.
Those are not the behaviors of people avoiding sacrifice. Those are the behaviors of people who have decided a dependent is worth restructuring their life around, and then doing it.
Velez’s conclusion is the one to keep: American ideals have long defined family as a household with children, and family in practice covers far more than that. It includes whoever you share a loving bond with, which can be a partner, and can be something with a wet nose.
What’s new since this was written
The data has kept moving in the same direction, and it has gotten much more specific about why.
The CDC’s provisional numbers show the U.S. general fertility rate fell again in 2025, to about 53.1 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, a record low in data that goes back to 1909. That is not a blip. That is a trend line with a decade of consistency.
And the 2025 American Family Survey, out of Brigham Young University, put the reason on the table in a way that is hard to argue with. 71 percent of adults disagreed that having children is affordable for most people. When asked directly about barriers, 43 percent cited insufficient financial resources, while only 22 percent cited a lack of personal desire.
Read those two numbers next to each other. Money outranks desire by nearly two to one.
Which means the popular version of this story, that a generation looked at parenthood and shrugged, is roughly twice as wrong as it is right. Most of the people not having children wanted the option and could not afford it, and a great many of them went and got a dog, because a dog is a family you can actually pay for.
That is not a punchline about avocado toast. It is a housing and wage story wearing a dog collar.
References
- Births: Provisional Data for 2025 — National Center for Health Statistics, CDC
- US fertility rate dropped to another record low in 2025 — CNN
- Fertility rate drops to new record low: CDC — The Hill (reporting the 2025 American Family Survey findings)
- As Birth Rates in US Plummet, Are Pets Standing In For Children? — Veterinarians.org
