Americans are becoming less confident about their financial futures — except for those without children, according to a recent LendingTree survey of 2,000 U.S. adults.
Among adults who don’t currently consider themselves wealthy, optimism about becoming wealthy slipped across nearly every demographic LendingTree measured between 2023 and 2025, including age, gender, income and parental status.
Parents of children 18 or older reported the steepest decline, down nine percentage points. Parents with kids under 18 saw a five-point drop.
The lone exception was child-free Americans, with 42% optimistic in 2025 about becoming wealthy, up from 41% in 2023. That bucks the overall trend, as just 38% of Americans who don’t currently see themselves as wealthy believe they ever will be, down from 41% in 2023.
Child-care costs are up more than 50%
For parents, finding room in the budget for child-related expenses has gotten harder. It costs around $30,000 annually to raise a child young enough to require full-time day care — up 36% since 2023, according to a separate LendingTree study. That figure includes the cost of day care, extra rent, food, clothing, transportation and health insurance, although prices can vary widely by location.
Not every family faces all of these costs, of course. Some rely on relatives instead of formal child care, while others already live in larger homes or have fixed housing or transportation costs that don’t change much when they have children.
Even so, the increase has been dramatic. Nationally, day-care costs alone jumped by an average of 52% since 2023, largely due to inflation, higher wages for child-care workers and a shortage of providers, LendingTree says. Families now spend about 23% of their income on child-related expenses, according to the study.
“Most Americans are on a budget and don’t have a ton of wiggle room,” Matt Schulz, LendingTree’s chief consumer finance analyst, wrote in a blog post on the study. “When a big cost like child care shoots up by 40%-plus, it can be a real crisis.”
Child-free Americans, by contrast, may be feeling less financial pressure, giving them more freedom to save and invest. Couples without children had a median net worth of $398,960 in 2022, compared with $250,620 for couples raising children, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
Many are aware of that divide, with three-quarters of adults under 50 telling Pew Research Center last year that not having kids makes it easier to save for the future.
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