Dog Moms

Today, pets are superseding children and replacing human partners. It goes without saying that men are dogs, but what does it mean that dogs are now men?

Dog Moms

Move aside DINKs, today is the era of a new economic power unit—the Dual Income Little Dog Owners. Among millennials especially, it is common to say that pets are the new children. Any number of news outlets for urban professionals have published articles with taglines like “Thinking of pets as children is totally normal,” “Why America’s Falling Birth Rate Is Sensational News for the Pet Industry,” or “Dogs: The Best Kid You Could Ask For.” As the US birth rate hits a record low, pets are filling in the gap. The data bear this argument out: the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that pet expenditures rose by 78% between 2013 and 2021, an increase of over $100 billion.

This trend only seems to be intensifying. By the American Pet Products Association’s reckoning, “In 2023, the pet industry supplied an overall economic contribution of $303 billion, an increase of 16% from $260 billion in 2022.” It isn’t just the costs that illustrate the change—people also feel and think about their pets as furry children. A recent Pew Research Center survey reports that virtually all US pet owners (97%) say that their pets are “part of the family,” with over half of pet owners considering their pets to be “as much a part of the family as a human member.” 

The general line of thought goes that, with diminishing economic prospects and a nonexistent social safety net, millennials wait until later in life to have children—if at all—and satisfy the nurturing impulse with animals in the interim. As Amanda Mull writes for The Atlantic,

I got a dog because I was frustrated with everything else. The benchmarks that I was raised to believe would make me a real, respectable adult seemed foreign, even though I was 32, the same age when my mother, already a married homeowner working for the employer she’d have for the rest of her career, became pregnant with me.

For Mull, owning a pet does not just fulfill the desire to nurture others, it is also “a mark of emotional maturity,” and “a class marker and a way of coping with deep status anxiety.” Mull’s dog Midge “is not nearly as expensive as a child or a single-family home, but she is an indicator that I have mastered enough elements of my own life to introduce some joyful chaos into it.” Pets, that is, are a kind of consolation prize in a world wherein the American Dream is becoming ever more difficult to attain.

Yet some question this narrative. The most visible dog parents are often college-educated and upwardly-mobile, so some believe that the choice of pets over children may not always—or even primarily—reflect economic obstacles. Heidi J. Nast argues that for urban professionals, pets are not a capitulation to economic hardship but a choice of economic freedom. In her call for a “Critical Pet Studies,” Nast writes that:

While many analysts have made it clear that the rich are becoming richer and the poor, poorer, what is less commonly noted is that in most narcissistic contexts, child-rearing is a drag on an individual’s freedom to move and consume, leading many persons to opt out; it is not easy to circulate freely through avenues of consumption and privileged work with children in tow. Today, therefore, ideas about the good life often do not involve family and children.

As Nast contends, pets are less demanding, simpler to travel with, they don’t talk back, and they can be easily adopted (or given away) to suit one’s lifestyle. “In this sense, pets (especially dogs) invoke and involve an entirely new kind of sociality and love, one more tailored to the mobility and narcissism of postindustrial lives than children.” “[P]ets have not become substitutes for children,” Nast concludes, “they supersede them.”