About three-quarters of America’s youngest adults believe they can live fulfilling lives without children, the highest percentage in history.
This surprising statistic comes from Barna’s new survey of Generation Z adults (those born between 1999 and 2015). The study, “The State of Families Today,” reveals that they are delaying marriage because of financial concerns and emotional stressors.
“Today’s young people report high levels of anxiety, uncertainty, and emotional complexity in their daily lives. These factors can shape how they approach long-term decisions, such as marriage,” the researchers noted. “Rising costs of housing, education and daily living are likely to add to that reckoning, making the timing of marriage matter in ways that may not have been the case in previous generations.”
The group surveyed more than 3,500 adults in August 2024 and found that 74% of Gen Z respondents said they could live a fulfilling life without children, and only 67% said marriage was essential to raising children in a stable environment, the lowest percentage of any generation surveyed.
Newly released data shows that many young Americans are reconsidering previous generations’ philosophy of marrying young. Instead, Gen Z adults place more emphasis on emotional readiness, financial security, and certainty of long-term relationship survival before committing to marriage.
Pastor Mike Novotny, author of the new book Newlyweds: A Christian Guide to Loving Your First Year, makes it clear that marriage is not a prerequisite for a rich spiritual life, but he challenges the idea that young people put off getting married, noting that Jesus himself was never married.
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“I admire men who have been single all their lives, so I want to be very careful not to portray the image that they have to get married, that they have to get married young,” he told CBN News. “Jesus didn’t do that.”
Novotny also mentioned the Apostle Paul, who called his celibacy a gift that allows him to focus more intensely on the work of spreading the gospel.
But the pastor said delaying marriage in order to establish oneself is essentially no better option than having an “opportunity to grow together.”
“I got married when I was 22,” he said. “[My wife]Kim had just turned 22, and the fact that we were able to build our first home together at such a young age, learn how to run a household together, and learn how to budget together. I think it’s more difficult to have to compromise on a thousand things when we want to live our own independent lives, because we both have our own ways of doing[those things].”
Novotny continued, “Marriage is one of God’s greatest gifts in this world. It’s on the first page of the Bible, and it’s in the Garden of Eden. So we shouldn’t let the culture tell us that it’s more boring, that it’s good to have a rich career, to make money, to have big things, all those things, but in my experience, marriage is a wonderful thing and deserves to be prioritized on our list.”
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