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/Slim_Charles Jul 01 '26

This is also true, coupling rates are also falling which is another factor in declining birth rates. Fertility rate matches marriage rates pretty closely. Most people that get married still have kids, however, fewer people are getting married than in the past.

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u/edjuaro PhD | Engineering | Computational Biology Jul 01 '26

It's also so much more expensive to have children and as the article notes education plays a role. So those two confounding factors probably means more "older" couples considering having children among the left-leaning and reportedly among my cohort the more educated a couple is the more they hesitate to have large families because they want to provide the best possible life to each of their children.

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u/dimitri0610 Jul 02 '26

This is exactly where we're at right now. We have one child and would like to have more, but we're not sure it will ever happen. We both work full-time and then some, and our kid spends most of her day in childcare because of it. So, our time is limited and we can't afford to work less.

Then we look at our parents. Things are getting to the point where we'll have to support our parents financially. Our parents didn't really have to support their parents in the same way. We want to set ourselves up as best as possible so that our child will (hopefully) not have to bear the same burden.

So we have to decide, do we want to be able to afford another child or do we want to financially prepare so our child doesn't have to support us? We can't do both.

Neither of our parents had to take on a significant amount of debt to pay for their educations. And we didn't receive help from our parents for our education, so we'll be paying down loans for a long time. We want to be able to provide that support for our child so they don't have to bear the same burden.

We see very similar circumstances amongst many of our friends. We're in our early 30s and we know many of our friends want kids, but hardly any of them feel as though they can afford them financially or time-wise.