Is there a negative correlation between parenthood and pet ownership?

Question

That's what a friend of mime recently stated. I.e. if one owns a pet one is less likely to be parent and vice-versa.

Are there any data available to support such a claim? I'm sceptical, because there is also the classical family + dog cliché.

Mostly for fun I've drawn a graph with dog traces to visualise the assertion ;-)

Answer 1

This appears to be false.

• Knudson, "The Pet Food Market," 2003 (SOURCE):

Pet ownership is higher in households with children than in those without children. In a survey conducted by Mintel, 64 percent of households with children present owned pets whereas 52 percent of those without children owned pets (Mintel, p. 67).

The Mintel paper referenced is titled, "The U.S. Pet Food & Supplies Market," but I can't find a link to an abstract or something similar.

• Westgarth et al., "Factors associated with dog ownership and contact with dogs in a UK," 2007 (SOURCE):

This study supports the suggestion that dogs are more common in families who have older children (6-19 years), as has been generally observed in other countries.

• The tables HERE, based on data from the "U.S. Pet Ownership & Demographics Sourcebook (2007 Edition) " (LINK) seems to indicate that families with children own more pets than children-less families (potentially).

For example (values in percents):

Family Size	Dog	Cat	Bird	Horse
One person	13.2	16.8	12.7	12.1
Two persons	31.0	32.6	27.9	29.1
Three persons	21.4	20.6	20.4	22.0
Four or more persons	34.5	29.9	38.9	36.7

Thus, we see a see higher rates of ownership for households with more individuals living in them. I said "potentially" above, as we don't know the ages of these increased individuals. I will say, there's an obvious dip for three person households, so perhaps two parents with one child are seen with pets less often, and thus this hypothesis was created? Pure speculation, but I did see the big dip between two and four person households.

• The Australian Bureau of Statistics features some helpful data on this as well (LINK):

So, we see that families with all ranges of kids own pets all at rates above 50%.

The same site also has a similar breakdown to the table above (values in percents):

Family Size	Dogs	Cats	Birds	Fish	All
Married couple with dependants	49.0	32.9	21.0	16.0	74.0
Other married couple	37.3	25.7	16.3	5.4	59.4
Lone parent with dependants	41.1	29.5	11.4	7.5	62.2
Lone person aged less than 35	18.9	7.9	5.6	2.8	30.2
Lone person aged 60 or more	15.8	15.4	8.9	0.4	32.3

So, we see the highest rates of ownership for married couples with dependents and single parents with dependents (at least for all pets except birds). The next highest rates of ownership are from married couples with no dependents (I'm assuming that's what "other married couples" means).

• I saved this source for last, as I couldn't track the figures cited to something more reliable... HERE is a page from the American Humane Association, featuring this tidbit:

Pets live most frequently in homes with children: 64.1% of homes with children under age 6, and 74.8% of homes with children over age 6, have pets.

They have quite a list of sources at the bottom of the page, but without footnotes, I don't particularly want to figure out which one might contain this information. I'm thinking it might be the "U.S. Pet Ownership & Demographics Sourcebook" listed above, as this appears in the list of references. The webpage linked above for the sourcebook does have the following in it's list of figures provided (LINK)

• Distribution of households that owned pets versus all households, both pet-owning and nonpet-owning, by marital status, 2006

• Distribution of households that owned pets versus all households, both pet-owning and nonpet-owning, by household size, 2006
• Percentage of households that owned pets by life stage, 2006

Those would be the statistics to know, but I'm not paying $264 for the book! Nevertheless, the rest of the sources above seem to indicate that pet ownership is actually quite high among families with children, or at least higher for families with more than one child than with married/no-kid families.