It’s been hard to find a news outlet in the last week that hasn’t run with a headline like “Why ‘childless cat ladies’ are JD Vance’s biggest fear.” While many of Vance’s comments have been taken out of context, fertility, family, and childrearing have become deeply sensitive subjects, so the outrage is unsurprising. The most uncomfortable topics are often the most important. Young people’s lack of desire to build families suggests a lack of hope for the future—an alien sentiment in the United States.
I saw this firsthand as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, home to many childless, soon-to-be elites. I wrote columns in our school paper expressing my concerns about hookup culture, transactional relationships, and the lack of prioritization of dating. These columns often received the most pushback. In a pre-professional culture like Penn’s, claiming that marriage and family were our greatest contributions to society was often taboo, particularly for women. But why?
In my senior spring, I sat in a classroom of about 45 students discussing this subject. We had just read Motherhood by Sheila Heti, which asks, as Amazon puts it, “What is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother?” Heti answers: you lose yourself. Many in the class applauded this conclusion. When asked, about half confidently said that they never wanted to have kids. Another 30 percent or so said that they were uncertain, citing fears of climate change, the desire to put their careers first, and concerns over their mental health. The common theme: “With everything going on in the world [and in my own life], it would be selfish to have children.” Another way to frame it is to say that these young people just don’t feel secure enough to have kids.
Recent polling from Pew is consistent with my anecdotal experience. Of people aged 18 to 49 who don’t have children, 47 percent say it’s unlikely that they ever will. While the leading reasons people gave were that they “didn’t want to” or that “they wanted to focus on other things,” most other reasons suggested a lack of hope. Thirty-eight percent, for example, cited “concern about the state of the world,” 36 percent said they “can’t afford to raise a child,” 26 percent were worried about the environment, and 24 percent said that they “can’t find the right partner.” Even the claim of wanting to “focus on other things” hints at a desire to concentrate on things that one can control.
It’s indisputable that having kids requires hope and confidence for the future. My mother, from whom I derive my optimism, got pregnant with me soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She’s often told me about how frightening it was to bring a child into the world after a tragedy of that scale in her own city. She was not the only one with this fear: 9/11 was one of the first American tragedies that did not result in a baby boom. Rather than being instilled with confidence about a country that felt united after that attack, people were instead plagued by fear.
The Covid-19 pandemic followed this trend, but only in part—this time, fertility rate changes fell along ideological lines. While blue states experienced a baby bust during and following the pandemic, red states saw a baby boom. This is not so surprising. Conservatives, after all, enjoy a “fertility advantage,” with Republican counties registering significantly higher birth rates than their Democratic counterparts. Similarly, research reveals that being conservative correlates with higher rates of happiness—and happy people have more children.
Positive belief about the state of the world will motivate such people to have even more children. During the Trump administration, when they reported greater confidence that the next generation would be better off, Republicans saw a baby bump.
The discussion about childless adults shouldn’t be about reviving a stigma against people who cannot or choose not to start families. Rather, it should be about examining why so many in my generation are filled with cynicism and despair—and asking what can be done to instill in us the confidence that our parents and grandparents felt in wanting to contribute progeny to the country’s future.
However clumsily they may have been expressed, J. D. Vance’s comments highlight something important: in an age filled with grievance politics and negativity, young people are looking for hope. Their ambivalent or outright negative attitudes toward childrearing are a powerful sign that they haven’t found it yet.
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