Birth rates are falling, but don’t blame dogs in strollers, Taiwan study suggests

TAIPEI – Are pets crowding out babies? As concern grows over the global fertility crisis, people who chose to have dogs or cats, but not children, have become a popular scapegoat. In many cities, it is not uncommon to see pets dressed in fancy outfits and pushed around in strollers.

These pampered animals, the theory goes, have become replacements for human children, contributing to plummeting birth rates.

“Young people are not loving each other,” Mr Kim Moon-Soo, then labour minister of South Korea, said in 2023. “They love their dogs and carry them around, but they don’t get married and have children.”

In 2022, Pope Francis called people who choose pets over children selfish, and warned that childlessness would contribute to a “demographic winter”.

It is not hard to find evidence of the cultural shift. A festival in Japan that honours children’s birthdays has undergone a pet-friendly revamp, allowing dogs to receive blessings as well. At a Tokyo celebration in 2025, a shrine honoured 350 dogs and just 50 children.

“People have shifted from having children to having pets,” said Ms Miki Toguchi, 51, who recently visited the shrine with her miniature schnauzer. “I don’t have children, but I have a dog.”

But a new working paper suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong, at least in Taiwan, where the birth rate is one of the lowest in the world. Researchers found that rather than replacing children, pets are more likely to be a stepping stone to having them.

The study authors were well aware of the stereotype. “There was this joke that if you go to the biggest park in Taipei City and you see a stroller coming by, the probability of a pet, either a dog or cat, being inside it is much higher than a child being in it,” said Mr Lin Ming-jen, an author of the study.

To figure out if people in Taiwan were actually replacing babies with stroller puppies, the researchers drew on government data on pet and birth registrations, tracking the timing and correlation of those life events for millions of households.

They found that pets were not replacing babies, they were preceding them. The data showed that people with pets, particularly dogs, were more likely than non-pet owners to have children.

To the researchers, this strongly suggested that people who were considering having children wanted to try pet ownership first – perhaps as a lower-risk way of figuring out if they were suited to parenthood.

“It seems like the story is that many people have dogs, they try it out,” said Mr Chen Kuan-ming, another author of the paper. If the dog ownership went well, then they would feel more confident about committing to parenthood.

The takeaway here is not that puppies should be handed out to boost the birth rate, nor is one working paper based on one location evidence that the same pattern would play out elsewhere.

But the study should give pause to those quick to blame falling birth rates on individual decisions.

In reality, falling birth rates have multiple causes, many of them economic. The effective cost of having children has risen steeply as standards of living have increased.

At the same time, “intensive parenting” norms mean that parents in most developed countries now spend roughly twice as much time on childcare as they did in the 1960s. And as women’s economic opportunities have improved, making it easier for them to support themselves, that has lessened the pressure to marry and have kids.

Those massive societal and economic shifts have brought many benefits. But they have also had costs, including a downstream effect on birth rates. Finding solutions may be daunting – but do not blame the puppies. NYTIMES