Is it All Puppies and Rainbows? : Household Pets in a Lowest-low Fertility Context

• In Event: 21016 - Fertility Desires and Patterns in Changing Social Contexts

Abstract

At the end of 2023, a major e-commerce platform in South Korea made a starring statement in its consumer report. Among the total strollers sold on the platform during the first three quarters, 57% were for pets, beating the sales of infant strollers which took 43%. News outlets and journalists were quick to follow up with headlines, all of which read along the lines of “More strollers sold for furry companions than infants” (Berger 2024; No 2023). Whereas one could have ascribed this factoid to fast-growing popularity of pets (or pet strollers) in South Korea, under the context of lowest-low fertility where the total fertility rate dropped to 0.72 in the same year, it was perhaps too easy for people to speculate a connection between the two. Despite the cultural salience of pets in the making of modern families, a dearth of family sociology and demography literature has addressed its meaning. In this paper, I examine how family contexts are related to pet ownership in South Korea. I place a special focus on associations between pet ownership and marriage, childbearing, and ‘empty-nest’ households to empirically investigate if pets are regarded as a ‘child alternative’ in the lowest-low fertility context.

Author

• Ha-Joon Chung, Princeton University