I am an enthusiastic natalist. By that I mean that I want our nation to grow, I want people to have as many children as they want to have, and I want those people who are on the fence about having children to feel encouraged about their ability to raise one.
I’m not a natalist for economic reasons — though I do think aging societies can create economic problems. And I agree with my colleague Jessica Grose that there is too much panic among natalists about declining birthrates. I also believe that life itself is good. Ideally, the decision to have a child carries with it a decision to love another person more than you love yourself, and that kind of sacrificial love is a foundation of a flourishing society.
Sacrificial love is not exclusive to parents, of course, but it flows naturally from decent people when they have kids.
I am, however, skeptical of natalism as a movement. At the political level, it strikes me as mostly futile. It has more promise as a cultural cause, but even then it is often scolding and even malicious. When JD Vance rants, for example, about “childless cat ladies,” he’s not engaged in a coherent cultural argument. He’s mocking those who live differently. When a prominent right-wing activist like Charlie Kirk says that “the childless are the ones that are destroying the country” and adds that “if you’re bad, you probably don’t have children,” he’s doing much the same thing.
During my years in fundamentalist Christianity, I also saw a sense of moral superiority develop around large families. Movements like Quiverfull would teach that large families were a sign of religious obedience, and even less extreme believers would often view the single life as somehow suspect — in spite of clear biblical endorsements of singleness.
And then there’s the darkness of natalism as a response to immigration, especially as a response to immigrants of color. The racist “great replacement theory” depends in part on the notion that immigrants are essentially replacing a population that can no longer renew itself. The response is to both shut the doors to newcomers and revitalize the native birthrate.
What’s a pronatalist who is skeptical of natalism to do? I have four suggestions.
First, demonstrate extreme humility about the power of government policy. While I’m quite persuaded by the argument that having children is good and that below-replacement fertility presents any society with a profound long-term problem, it’s also the case that no one has figured out the answer. No one is even close to figuring out the answer.
It’s also important to remember that declining fertility is a nearly universal problem in the developed world. As Christine Emba observed in an excellent piece in The Atlantic, “Today, every O.E.C.D. country except Israel has a below-replacement fertility rate, and the speed of the decline during the past decade has outpaced demographers’ expectations.”
While it’s too much to say that public policy has no effect on the birthrate at all, it’s also the case that there is no clear example of any single policy or suite of policies that elevates the birthrate back to replacement level. When the combination of economic and political equality and access to birth control grants women more control over reproduction, they tend to have fewer children — regardless of their country or culture.
As Emba wrote, South Korea has spent more than $200 billion on policies to increase its birthrate, and it kept falling. France spends proportionately more on family support than any other O.E.C.D. country, and its birthrate is the lowest it’s been since World War II. Scandinavian countries have long been considered model nations for generous family support, and their fertility rate is also declining.
In fact, there’s even evidence that some family-friendly policies can hurt fertility. A 2019 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper studying the effects of California’s Paid Family Leave Act found that “overall, P.F.L.A. tended to reduce the number of children born and, by decreasing mothers’ time at work, increase time spent with children.”
Such findings aren’t definitive, of course, and other studies have reported some positive benefits to leave policies and expanded access to child care, but the difficulty of finding a policy solution to declining birthrates is so plain that I’m immediately suspicious of anyone who believes that government policy can decisively shift what is plainly a cross-cultural, nearly universal human phenomenon.
Second, do not shame or mock those who are childless or have fewer children. It seems crazy that I even have to say this, but parts of the natalist right have adopted a view of what they call modern selfishness that is, quite simply, at odds with human experience.
In reality, American parents spend more time with their children than they used to. As a rule, they have fewer kids and pour more of their time into raising them. I’m part of Generation X, what’s been called “the least parented generation in U.S. history.” We’re the latchkey kids who, for better and worse, became helicopter parents, and it is offensive to tell people who are shuttling children between recitals and practices that they’re “selfish” for not wanting to add another child to a life that already seems to be bursting at the seams.
Even if you want to live differently, to go against the grain, it’s difficult to be truly countercultural. My oldest daughter married and had her first child while in college, and her classmates were incredulous. Even when we tried to raise our kids with less supervision, it was hard to find other kids who were free to play. Talk to a single man or woman and ask how easy it is to meet a person with whom they want to raise a child.
It’s also important to emphasize that there is nothing inherently wrong with either singleness or childlessness. Some of the most selfless and sacrificial people I know are single or never had children. Indeed, their childlessness can sometimes free them to engage with the community in a way that I simply could not, when all three of my kids were school-age.
Third, recognize that childlessness may well be downstream from different problems, including isolation and loneliness. Americans spend much more of their time alone than they used to. People who are alone don’t meet spouses. People who are alone can often feel more vulnerable. Young people are spending less time with friends, and they’re having less sex, to such an extent that smart observers say that America is in the midst of a “sex recession.”
Isolation can also make parenting feel more perilous. When my wife and I had kids, we were able to take for granted the existence of a large safety net of relatives and friends. We both came from intact families and have loving parents and siblings. Our kids were immediately immersed in a healthy extended family. We also have thick networks of friends and a loving church community that can (and does) step up the instant we experience family distress.
Remove any one of those things, much less all of them, and parenting can seem extremely daunting. The lack of a relational safety net makes child care more expensive and more difficult. The lack of family or church support — especially in the face of economic distress — can leave prospective parents feeling extraordinarily vulnerable. In that context, it can make a considerable amount of sense to delay child-rearing until the family feels more financially secure.
There’s also evidence that parenting itself might cause loneliness, especially for women. On Monday, Lyman Stone, a demographer at the Institute for Family Studies, posted a fascinating thread on X showing that parents spend less time with their friends than people without children, which is understandable considering the time we spend with our kids, but also that mothers are now spending less time with their friends while their kids are around. As Stone observed, “The demise of American friendship has made American parenting a much harder, lonelier, more confusing, more isolating task.”
Oddly enough, men are spending more time hanging out with other men and their kids, but mothers are not. Stone doesn’t have an explanation (he believes that women may be leery of spending time with mothers who have different parenting styles), but regardless of the reason, the reality is alarming. There is something about the modern culture of parenting that is disconnecting mothers from one another.
Fourth, lead by example. Earlier this year I read a thought-provoking book by Timothy Carney, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, called “Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be.” The most powerful parts of the book describe the Carney family and the way in which it has made intentionally countercultural decisions to sustain and support a family that features six kids.
The Carneys shun travel sports. They live close to church and family. They grant their children the great freedom of unstructured play. It’s not a lifestyle that can or should appeal to everyone, but I think that the best argument for any cultural movement is more your life than your words. Do you walk your talk? Is your family thriving? Is your countercultural experience an inspiration? Or a cautionary tale?
One of the reasons for the intensity of the American culture war is the fixation on top-down change. Different factions of American life compete to seize the political and cultural high ground and then attempt to dictate — through policy or cultural pressure — conformity with their vision of the good life.
But there’s a different theory of cultural change, one that is rooted less in the top-down paradigm of politics and policy and more in the bottom-up experience of a free people who form relationships and associations to advance shared values. Those are the “little platoons” that Edmund Burke found indispensable to human flourishing.
Of course, you should advance the policies you believe will most help families flourish. I support an expanded child tax credit, paid family leave, free school lunches and Medicaid expansion because I believe that each of these policies will help parents and kids regardless of their impact on the birthrate, and if they do have some marginal impact on the number of births in America, then that’s a bonus.
But there is no substitute for a life well lived. The best and most concrete things we can do to help encourage people to have kids include supporting struggling families and demonstrating by our actions — and generosity — that they are not alone.
The possibilities for local engagement are endless. The possibilities that politics will solve the problem, by contrast, are much more tenuous. Women want more children than they’re having. We don’t know what policies would help them achieve their goals, but we can support our family members and friends. We can ease loneliness. And we can, like Carney, provide an example that exhibits the love and joy of a different kind of life.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column wasn’t a column. It was a long, substantial interview with Justice Neil Gorsuch. I spent an hour with him in his chambers last Wednesday, and while I didn’t get to all of my questions, I did get to quite a few. One of his more interesting answers related to collegiality. The proof of the court’s collegiality, Gorsuch argued, was in its frequent consensus:
There are nine of us who’ve been appointed by five different presidents over the course of 30 years. We have very different views about how to approach questions of statutory interpretation, constitutional interpretation about political disagreements or interpretive methodological disagreements. Yet we’re able to reach a unanimous verdict on the cases that come before us about 40 percent of the time; I think it might have been even higher this last term. I don’t think that happens automatically.
I think that’s the product of a lot of hard work. I think that’s proof of collegiality. OK? That is what we do and we do well. Now people often say, “Well, what about the 6-3s?” Fair enough. Fair enough. But that’s about a third of our docket. And it turns out they aren’t always what you think they are. About half the 6-3s this last term are not the 6-3s you’re thinking about.
On Monday, I published something a little bit different, a book review of a marvelous new book by Eliza Griswold called “Circle of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power and Justice in an American Church.” Griswold embedded herself in a progressive evangelical church and had a front-row seat when the church imploded in the midst of disputes over race and politics. What started as a story of a unique church turned into a story that should resonate with all of us. It’s a story about how political and religious disagreements can disrupt the closest of friendships and destroy the best institutions, something I’ve experienced firsthand:
Circle of Hope suffered from the same maladies I’ve seen time and again in both religious and secular organizations: With great passion can come great intolerance. Small differences create big arguments, and then the way in which people argue becomes more important than what they argue about. People can heal from disagreements over, for example, the best way for a church to respond to the history and legacy of American racism. It’s harder to heal when disagreements turn personal.
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