When some Taylor Swift fans listened to the lyrics of her 2025 song “Wi$h Li$t,” in which she sings about yearning to “settle down” with “a couple kids,” they heard a Republican dog whistle. On social media, they claimed that Swift’s desire for family life was “a conservative agenda on a silver platter.”
Swift, an avowed feminist who has endorsed Democratic political candidates, almost certainly did not set out to make “tradwife propaganda.” But her online critics are getting at something real: Having children—particularly lots of children—has become a bit right-coded, as the kids say. Americans and Europeans who identify as leftist or liberal tend to have fewer children than those who identify as conservative or right-leaning. In the United States, differences in desired fertility seem to start at a young age—one 2024 study found that Republican-identifying 12th graders said they want more children than Democrat-identifying 12th graders.
Of course, plenty of liberals have children, and plenty of conservatives have small families or remain childless. And many Americans identify as neither conservative nor liberal, but rather as something in between. Still, several academics told me that research conducted in the past few years has shown a fairly strong association between ideology and fertility. The latest evidence comes from a June report by the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank that promotes marriage and family life, which polled more than 7,000 Americans aged 18 to 54 and found that self-identified conservatives had 1.4 kids, on average, to liberals’ 1.09, a statistically significant difference. The study also found that liberals were more likely to not have children. The ideological fertility gap remained even after controlling for other variables that may influence family size, such as religion, race, income, age, marital status, and education.
[Read: A culture war in the bedroom]
Lyman Stone, the head of IFS’s pronatalism initiative and the researcher who ran the poll, told me that when he first saw the results, he thought, Duh. This trend of greater fertility on the right fits with a pattern that he and other demographers have noticed since the 1990s. There’s no clear explanation for why, precisely, liberals tend to have fewer children than conservatives do. Causation and correlation are difficult to untangle here. Liberals are more likely to pursue higher education and to marry later, both of which can lead to having fewer children, and some research suggests that having children may make a person become more socially conservative.
The researchers I spoke with put forth three general theories about why the partisan fertility gap may persist, beyond simple demographics. First, liberals seem to have more anxiety about both the state of the world and their own parenting abilities, which may make them more reluctant to start a family. Second, the values and aspirations of liberals and conservatives tend to differ in ways that shape how they choose to live their lives. Finally, for decades, liberals and conservatives have been sorting into disparate geographic locations and lifestyles, and their respective bubbles seem to reinforce the decision to have children, or not. The result is that a singer such as Swift expressing her desire to have children may, to some liberals, seem like she’s spinning propaganda for a traditional life they can’t imagine wanting.
Some of the most striking data points from the IFS survey suggest that liberals hold a bleaker view of parenthood than conservatives do. Among liberals, 18 percent of respondents were unsure whether they would be a good parent, compared with 9 percent of conservatives. More than a third of the liberals said they thought parenting is “very complicated, difficult, and stressful,” compared with less than a quarter of conservatives. And 19 percent of liberals thought their mental health was “not good enough to have children right now,” compared with 10 percent of conservatives. All three beliefs were associated with having fewer children. “These views of parenting shape your idea of how hard and how rewarding it’s going to be to be a parent,” Stone said.
Other researchers I interviewed suggested several factors that might lead liberals to have this grim perspective. One is that liberals are more likely to follow a broad array of mainstream news sources, which may make them more aware of societal problems such as climate change or rising authoritarianism, and thus more concerned about bringing children into a world with such seemingly intractable challenges. Keeping up with current events could also alert liberals to changes in state policies that make pregnancy riskier. “The media that you consume, is it telling you that you might not be able to get pregnancy care if you need it?” Karen Guzzo, a demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies family formation, asked me.
According to Guzzo, liberals may also be more likely to believe that daunting news events will have a measurable impact on their life. Conservatives, by contrast, tend to believe that they will persevere despite whatever happens in the world. Many studies have shown that conservatives tend to favor individual responsibility and free will as an explanation for people’s successes and failures. When faced with a hypothetical scenario of a person losing their job, for example, conservatives are more likely to assume that the person was a poor performer, rather than that the company had financial problems. Guzzo said that many liberals, by contrast, are more likely to believe that structural factors such as the economy or the housing market will shape their future.
Some researchers also wondered whether therapeutic ideas about trauma and family dynamics could play a role in discouraging liberals from having kids. Liberals are more likely than conservatives to seek out counseling, and one view that can emerge in therapy is that the client’s own parents damaged them in some way. If someone believes “my parents have harmed me,” Heather Rackin, a Louisiana State University sociologist who studies family formation, told me, “they might become really afraid of reproducing those harms on their children.”
Another factor possibly driving the fertility gap is that Democrats and Republicans, as a whole, have different values. Researchers told me that many Democrats believe that the pinnacle of achievement is having a good education and a fruitful career. For many Republicans, the primary goal in life is to raise children. Conservatives, Stone said, “tend to just be predisposed to think that family is what you’re supposed to do.”
Conservatives and liberals, Rackin said, seem to have different answers to the questions “What does it mean to be an adult?” and “What does it mean to live a good life?” According to various studies and surveys, she said, “conservatives are more likely to see people as embedded within traditions and obligations and social roles, and parenthood is a role.” Liberals, Rackin added, seem more interested in self-definition, and in “constructing and expressing your own identity and aspirations. You don’t just accept roles because of tradition.” In one recent Pew Research Center poll, for instance, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say that having children was “highly important” for living a fulfilling life, and in another, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say that creative activities were “one of the most important things” to them. Democrats, then, may be less willing to choose parenthood when it competes as a priority with career, friendships, travel, and other pursuits.
[Read: The best parenting hack is being rich]
Religion explains much of this values gap. Some 80 percent of conservatives are Christian, for example, compared with 37 percent of liberals, and many denominations of Christianity encourage having children. But even in studies that control for religiosity, some of the difference in desired fertility between the parties remains. Something about the conservative worldview seems oriented toward family life. “I think even if you took nonreligious conservatives and nonreligious liberals and compared them,” Rackin said, they’d still have different definitions of the meaning of life, which would in turn give them different perspectives on whether to have children.
The final explanation for the partisan fertility gap stems from the fact that, over the past few decades, the two major political parties have become more and more geographically sorted. Democrats tend to live among Democrats; Republicans, among Republicans. Jacob Brown, a Boston University political scientist who studies this phenomenon, told me this doesn’t necessarily mean Republicans and Democrats physically moved away from each other. Instead, the two parties shifted over time such that they have come to represent different types of people—the Democratic Party appeals to people in cities; the Republican Party targets rural voters. Now people who belong to each party disproportionately socialize with other people of the same party. Less than a third of Democrats, according to one recent survey, have “at least some” Republican friends.
This sorting means that initially small differences in fertility between liberals and conservatives can compound over time. As liberals see many other liberal, child-free people around them, and conservatives see fellow conservatives with larger families, they may make decisions about their own family size based on the choices of their friends and neighbors. “You’re getting cues about what appropriate behavior is from those around you,” Rackin said.
Research from the Penn State sociologist Daniel DellaPosta shows how this kind of social reinforcement can work. In a 2015 study, DellaPosta and his colleagues examined a survey of 216 different activities and beliefs—such as watching a dance performance or reading horoscopes—and found that 58 percent of them were significantly correlated with political ideology. People who dismissed modern art as something “a child could do,” for example, tended to be conservative, whereas jazz aficionados were likely to be liberal. This isn’t because liberal psychology necessarily fosters a love for John Coltrane. Rather, liberals and conservatives tend to interact with people similar to themselves, and through those exchanges, they influence one another’s lifestyle, DellaPosta told me. A liberal jazz fan, in other words, will spread his enthusiasm for A Love Supreme to other liberals because his social network is likely to be made up mostly of liberals.
[From the March 2020 issue: The nuclear family was a mistake]
Something similar could be happening with decisions about whether to have children, or how many to have. “Political identity and all kinds of lifestyle preferences can become very closely aligned even when there’s no necessary or intrinsic connection between them,” DellaPosta told me. (He’s not the only one who’s found these associations: In a 2018 study, two researchers found that liberals are, in fact, more likely to drink lattes than conservatives are.)
Of course, some behaviors and beliefs do have an obvious connection to politics. Conservatives in DellaPosta’s study were more likely to endorse spanking kids, for instance, which aligns with conservatism’s more traditionalist worldview. Liberals were more likely to say that people who intend to get married should live together first, which corresponds with liberalism’s more sexually permissive mores. But DellaPosta’s work also shows that political preferences may influence decisions about having children not because there’s something Republican about having kids, but because political affiliation invisibly guides how people live their life.
Maybe no single one of these theories is right—but, rather, all of them are. Ideology may nudge people into parenthood or childlessness by subtly shaping what they value, what they fear, whom they surround themselves with, and what they want out of life. The end result is that, as everyone settles on one side of the parenthood fence or the other, many pick the side with people a lot like themselves.
The post Why Liberals Have Fewer Kids Than Conservatives appeared first on The Atlantic.
