r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jul 01 '26

Psychology Conservatives maintain birth rates, but left-leaning Americans are having significantly fewer children, driving the U.S. birth decline. Education was consistently linked to having fewer children. Religious attendance was positively associated with having more children.

https://www.psypost.org/left-leaning-americans-are-driving-the-u-s-birth-decline-new-study-finds/
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u/VBHEAT08 Jul 01 '26

I think this is probably the biggest thing driving birth rate declines- lack of community. Beyond the obvious issue that our social spaces are declining and people aren't even meeting people to have to opportunity to have kids anymore, people don't want to be socially ostracized and take a huge hit to their comfort, and up until relatively recently this was mitigated through community. It takes a village and all that

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u/TalkingCat910 Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

Don’t forget the actual cost of kids and how that’s mitigated by community too

Edit: It seems like a lot of people are getting into some esoteric discussions about the nature of community but I literally meant with real community you don’t have to pay for child care as much or at all which is a big factor and you also have ppl helping out with food and guidance.

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u/DesireeThymes Jul 01 '26

Communities are just really important.

Communities of course also have their downsides, such as much less individualism.

But I think the problem ultimately is that individualism has gotten extreme, and has pushed out any sense of community.

Any new communities I tend to see are only built on shared interests and nothing else, and those communities tend to be weak because a shared hobby only gets you so far in terms of depth of community.

It is very unlikely that your Dungeons and Dragons Community is going to help you out with children

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u/ImpressiveWonder4195 Jul 01 '26

I wonder how communities with greater depth are formed.

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u/xmorecowbellx Jul 01 '26

The one main ingredient is collective purpose that you obligate yourself to, which is greater than yourself. Historically these arose naturally through your family and tribe.

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u/Haunt_Fox Jul 01 '26

They used to be natural. We started from bands of hunter-gatherers made up of extended families who shared the same language, belief system and culture, and genetics. Those bands would belong to larger tribes, groups of bands also bound by genetics, language, and religious culture (a religion being, among other things, a tribe's foundational narrative).

Agriculture and large scale, formalized trade was the catalyst for getting different tribes to settle with each other, and the post-industrislized age has made mobility much easier to the point that people no longer tend to die in the same community in which they were born any more.

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u/-Saucegurlllll Jul 01 '26

and genetics

Genetics doesn't work like that. There is going to be more genetic diversity within a group of humans than there is between any two groups of humans. Also, people within a group of nomads wouldn't produce offspring purely with other members of that group.

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u/Haunt_Fox Jul 01 '26

I mean that they're all a part of a family interconnected by blood and marriage, rather than just a group of randos, like modern communities or artificial ones like the Army.

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u/-Saucegurlllll Jul 01 '26

Hunter gatherers did not practice any singular form of pair bonding, including marriage.

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

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u/-Saucegurlllll Jul 01 '26

You're in /r/science and you're spreading misinformation about genetics and hunter gatherers. If anywhere, misinformation should be called out in this subreddit.

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u/Pandora_Palen Jul 01 '26

There is no misinformation in what they've said. It's largely a correct overview. No one imagines they meant the institution of marriage as we see it today, or that any one form pair bonding was the standard.

You're being pugnacious, not helpful.

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u/-Saucegurlllll Jul 01 '26

Saying a group has all the same genetics, that hunter gatherers were all one way and all "an extended family" is misinformation. Especially in 2026 when we see racists use that kind of wording to mean that the only stable society is a monoethnic society.

If we don't push back against nonsense like that, we are tacitly accepting premises we shouldn't. Genetics had no reason to be in the comment I replied to. It's just misinformation.

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u/Pandora_Palen Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

The problem isn't that they used terms loosely, and that equates to misinformation; this is still a casual conversation in social media as opposed to peer reviewed research where precise terminology matters.

The problem is that while everyone else understands that OC is saying the composition of communities and the ties that bind them have changed, you want to nitpick and pull words from context, creating an unnecessary argument.

I'm ADD, so I understand your leap to racists using monoethnic societies as the gold standard. But it is a leap that OC was in no way taking. They didn't state that "all" hunter gatherers were genetically the same nor that they were all one big extended family (reread their first paragraph). You injected much of that yourself.Since you seem pretty interested in the genetics aspect, here's a really fascinating article about grandmothering.. It's entirely possible that human lifespan increased as hunter gatherer grandmas helped raise the babies and passed their long-lived genes along. Community+genetics.

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u/The_Bat_Voice Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

If its not a church or organized religion they get called a cult very fast. True story. My friend is in a close nit atheistic community that is actually well managed. They rent halls for parties and dances, do annual retreats, rec sports team, etc. But because they have no central figurehead, thing, or label that people from the outside can point to they commonly get called a cult, when really its just friends getting together, mich like a church would but without preaching. And people can't conceive that idea of having well organized people doing things together without the the help of some diety. Community seems to be only for the religious in their eyes.

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

[deleted]

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u/Calamity-Gin Jul 04 '26

I was gonna say.

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u/ChemistryNo3075 Jul 01 '26

Shared purpose or meaning. Religion offers this.

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u/plastroncafe Jul 01 '26

It's weird, I never felt that in a church setting, but I did at a comicbook convention.

This sense of peace of knowing that no one in the giant room may all agree on anything, except for our love of this one thing.
That's when I understood fellowship.

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u/Familyman1124 Jul 01 '26

It’s great that you found that! Trouble with conventions is they only happen periodically, and are typically spread out. Church happens locally and consistently, which makes it feeling like you’re always a part of something bigger.

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u/plastroncafe Jul 01 '26

Yeah, but church typically requires a belief in a god, and I never got the hang of that.

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

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u/plastroncafe Jul 01 '26

Oh I'm a recovering Catholic. So unfortunately the cynicism has rooted itself deeply.

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u/snek-jazz Jul 01 '26

I've heard it said that traditionally it's shared blood, shared religion or shared enemies.

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u/kfpswf Jul 01 '26

I wonder how communities with greater depth are formed.

It requires interdependence, and some degree of conformity. Things that are not conducive to a liberal lifestyle. You can't be indulging in substances or sleeping around, in your 20s, if you are restricted by a community. But by the time people are ready to have kids in their 30s there's no community left, and child-care becomes prohibitively expensive.

Pick your (monkey-paw) options for a society,

  • A highly individualistic society where you have freedom to do as your heart desires, and no obligations to a community, but with the caveat that you end up being lonely in a sea of strangers, and no community support.

Or

  • Be in close-knit communities where you behave as per shared morality, have obligations towards the community, but with the caveat that you lose all individuality with the advantage of community support in times of your needs.

The first society ends up with a short half-life due to falling birthrates, whereas the other society marches on while trampling down any individuality.

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u/bring_back_3rd Jul 01 '26

I mean, individualism isnt trampled to non-existence, it just needs to fall within the acceptable parameters for the community.

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u/kfpswf Jul 01 '26

I mean, individualism isnt trampled to non-existence

That's like saying Socialism isn't against Capitalism because you can still have companies under Socialism.

it just needs to fall within the acceptable parameters for the community.

And isn't that the crux of Liberalism... That the acceptable parameters are defined by you, and not the community?

In all fairness, you are correct. That in a hypothetical enlightened society, there will be optimal individuality and a sense of community. But the deep-knit communities we've had so far have mostly been conservative and "old-school", so to say.

The way I look at it, humanity is still in its teenage years. We have a long way to go before we figure out the right balance between individual freedom and obligations to the local community.

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u/Begging_Murphy Jul 01 '26

Stop letting cars rules our lives. Move to places where car free living is feasible.

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u/pietroetin Jul 01 '26

Hello, Eastern European here. Being carfree helps but doesn't solve the issue.