What can we do about low fertility rates?

The Institute for Family Studies (IFS) titled its 2026 State of Fertility Report “The Demographic Dead End.” American fertility has fallen below 1.6 children per woman, well under the 2.1 needed to hold a population steady. On current trends, the report projects, the U.S. population peaks in the mid-2050s and declines from there.

The usual explanation is money. Children are expensive, housing is expensive, and young adults are broke. Fair enough. But Americans still say they’d be happiest with 2.4 children, and the gap between the family people want and the family they have is the widest since the early 1970s.

But the evidence suggests the explanation for this may be more cultural than financial. After all, there are identifiable differences between those who are having children and those who aren’t. Among Americans under 30, regular churchgoers want about 2.7 children; those who never attend want about two. A separate IFS analysis found the most Republican fifth of counties has a fertility rate of 1.76; the most Democratic fifth, 1.37—lower than the European Union.

A growing number of people don’t want to get married and don’t want children. We blame divorce, cohabitation, expressive individualism, and the decoupling of sex from procreation. They’re all relevant. But they’re symptoms, not the root cause. Underneath them lies a conviction so ordinary we no longer notice it—that the purpose of your life is to be happy and comfortable.

Given that premise, we can understand why someone might choose a life devoid of commitment and children. Marriage is a lifelong promise to another sinner, and parenthood is an even greater act of faith. Both carry enormous financial and emotional costs, and unlike marriage, there’s no divorce court for parenthood. If maximizing happiness in the short term is the greatest good, opting out of marriage and family is a defensible decision.

The tragedy is that the premise is false. This isn’t merely a biblical claim. Increasingly, it’s what the social science tells us as well. Maximizing short-term happiness doesn’t produce happiness. We are most satisfied doing what we were made to do, and God has been clear that the road to joy runs through self-denial. We gain our lives by losing them. Living for ourselves produces isolation; living for others produces belonging.

The satisfaction radical autonomy promised never arrived. For the past 50 years, the General Social Survey found that 30 to 35 percent of Americans are “very happy.” In 2024 it was 23 percent, among the lowest readings ever recorded. We ranked 23rd in this year’s World Happiness Report, outside the top 20 for a third straight year, with the steepest declines among the young.

While happiness is unfortunately declining, there’s something identifiable about those who remain happy. Forty percent of married mothers report being very happy, compared with 22 percent of unmarried women without children. Married men are about twice as likely as unmarried men to say the same. Economist Sam Peltzman, reviewing five decades of that data, found a 30-point happiness gap between married and unmarried Americans, a better predictor than income or education. It seems sacrifice is not the enemy of joy, but the delivery mechanism.

While marriage and family do produce a happier population, more than personal happiness is at stake. An aging population with a shrinking workforce cannot fund its retirements, its military, or its institutions. Somebody has to build the things, pay for the things, and defend the things.

The IFS report proposes to fix this with $15,000 birth accounts that mature into six-figure baby bonuses and estimate the program would lift fertility from 20% to 40%. Cash incentives may move fertility at the margins, and they may even be worthwhile. But they cannot solve the deeper problem because they leave untouched the beliefs that caused the decline in the first place.

What’s needed is a cultural recovery of the goods of marriage and family. We need to recover the conviction that marriage and children are worth pursuing because they are objective personal and social goods, not because they are easy or risk free. Birth rates are ultimately a lagging indicator of what a people believe life is for. Answer that question correctly and the rest will follow.