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Are Pets Replacing Kids?
I have noticed a growing trend of people talking about their pets like children, and pet owners being increasing referred to as parents, mother or fathers of their pets, and the pets as children. Often this goes as far as to referring to multiple pets being referred to as siblings, or even pets referred to siblings of actual children. For examples on social media, you can look at asinine "feel good" animal related YouTube channels like "The Dodo". I'm hardly the first to comment on the phenomenon, a quick internet search for "furbabies" turns up countless articles. However, while most media coverage on this phenomena is playful and positive, my intuition has long been that this isn't just a harmless, fun phenomenon, but rather these 'parents' are really using these pets as a substitute for children. Perhaps attempting to fulfil an unrealised, subconscious need to raise offspring in a social environment hostile to the raising of actual, real human children.
Like any good researcher, I set out to find information to support my prior assumptions. I looked at U.S. data mostly for its abundance, however the overall quality of data is pretty poor, it's particularly hard to find reliable data on the historic rates of pet ownership and data relating to the pet industry going back further than 30 years or so ago.
Based on the APPA's APPA National Pet Owners Survey, the percentage of households with a pet has increased from 56% in 1988 to 70% in 2020. In absolute numbers, the number of pet cats and dogs increased from 108 million in 1996 to 188 million in 2022. But it is not simply the number of pets that are relevant, but the relationship owners have with the pet. Perhaps the most shocking statistic I saw was the growth of the pet industry. The US pet industry has grown from $53 billion in 2012 (~$68 billion adjusted for inflation), to $124 billion in 2021, the industry doubling in size in just a decade! A near doubling also occurred in the prior decade too. The growth has been driven in large part by the increased demand for luxury pet products. The US fertility rate dropped from 1.91 to 1.66 from 2012 to 2020 during this time. By comparison, the US baby products industry was worth $29 billion in 2022. Some (unreliable) survey data says that three-quarters of US pet owners consider their pets 'furbabies'. It should be noted that Millennials slightly overrepresented in many of these pet statistics. US pet owners are also more likely to be female (60%).
Now onto my speculation on the issue. Despite a lot of hand-wringing over the economic costs being the major driver behind young adults not having kids, those same young adults seem to be willing buy a pet and spend significant sums on them, treating them as a pseudo-child. Perhaps a pet is still a cheaper alternative than a child, but in my opinion the economic argument still doesn't hold up. As I like to point out, the fertility rate of the US was higher during the Great Depression, the worst economic period in modern history, than it is today. So the social factors must be playing a greater role, something that has been discussed quite extensively on theMotte in the past so I won't go into detail here. To summarise briefly, but technology, contraception, sexual liberation, feminism, the two-income trap and modernity generally may all have played some role. But humans are still ultimately biological and social creatures, and I think there is likely some innate driver to engage in parental (maternalistic/paternalistic), childrearing behaviours, for both men and women, but particularly women. When social pressure and event stigma prevent people from having children, they have substituted in the closest available, non-stigmatised alternative, pets. What I think is troubling is what will be the long-term consequences of using pets as surrogate children, because pets are not, in fact, children. Using pets as surrogate children is possibly contributing to the fertility crisis, providing a band-aid solution to the unrealised desire of childrearing. Children, as actual thinking humans, can form meaningful relationships with their parents and others, and contribute to community in ways that pets can obviously not provide. Thus furbabies may be accelerating the atomisation of society. When parents enter their elder years, they can rely on the support of their adult children to help. Children will also ultimately provide net economic utility to society, where as pets, as much people might love them, do not.
I personally find the whole phenomenon of pets as surrogate children disgusting or fundamentally morally wrong on a deep, visceral level. It feels so unnatural and perverse to me. I do love animals, including pets I have had in the past, but I would never dream of treating them remotely as people or children. As pessimistic as this is, my instinct that the rise of furbabies is hyper-representative of the cultural, social and moral decline of the West, and is strongly associated with the fertility crisis and the demographic collapse many Western or developed states are or will experience.
All real experiences are being replaced with more optimized simulations. Real experiences have limitations to how much you can optimize them. Pets can literally be bred for cuteness, docility, smallness etc, not so with human children. Streamers can optimize friendship, sex workers/OF egirls for sexuality, retirement homes for elderly care, recorded music for friends/family singing. Real experiences limited by blood relationships, geographic proximity, reciprocity and non-specialized providers just won’t be able to compete in the future (present) and it seriously troubles me
Cats are very well adapted to mimicking human infants but they aren't really in the same league.
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Isn't it about desensitization/addiction in general? When people haven't learned normal coping mechanisms, they would always find a way to wirehead themselves, virtual or not (drugs, alcohol, food). Low prices would drive substitution, sure, but the deeper problem is why people do -- or do not substitute in the first place. Why some people would binge read blogs and books, and other - binge quarrel at forums with no definite goal.
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I don't think this is true at all. No one is happy to pick streamers over real friends or onlyfans girls over actual sexual partners. Everyone knows they are a poor substitute at best.
That's definitely not true. There are in fact people who would rather watch streamers than have real friends, or jerk off to an onlyfans girl instead of having a girlfriend. I think those people are profoundly unhealthy and wrong, but they exist.
Ok maybe they exist but they're rare. I don't think we have an issue of these "hyperoptimized" alternatives being seen as generally preferable. The real appeal is that they are so low effort not that they are super optimized.
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Nobody thinks being obese is better than being fit, but pizza is still outcompeting healthy foods for an increasing portion of the population
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Basically: single-purpose specialized experience providers often leveraging technology will outcompete everything real eventually
We just.... All kinda forgot to have kids for a couple generations and then we were all too old. Out with a wimper indeed.
This feels accurate.
Personally, I've always (until somewhere around the mid 2010s) waffled on the question of whether or not I want to / should have children. In hindsight, I think it can be summed up as "Yes, but the more I think about it, the scarier it gets."
The problem is that there are some prerequisits I'm just ... not super interested in. In middle school, I had this tendency to fantasize about having children, but would handwave away where they came from. I think the book I published in high school could be interpreted as a self-insert parenting fantasy, that I suddenly realized was that halfway through and so the SI got uncomfortable about it in awkward infodummps because that's what was happening in my head. (In said book, the protags somehow wound up looking after not one, but two adorable space-orphans, withddout a shred of romance or sexuality to be found.)
This feels like the opposite of the rest of The West, where people have prioritized sex and romance over children, yet somehow it still feels like "we just kinda forgot for a couple generations" applies to me, too. Really deprioritized, in favor of the all-important Education.
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