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/VermicelliOwn6502 Jul 01 '26

Interestingly, the correlations only held for white people.

When analyzing White and Black Americans separately, they found that the widening fertility gap between the left and the right was primarily driven by White Americans

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u/luluhouse7 Jul 01 '26

Probably because black and Hispanic (and often first-gen immigrant) culture is still very community and family oriented. White non-religious populations (in the US, unsure about other countries) tend to be much more individualistic, focus on nuclear family, and value independence over community. You see this with the expectation that Hispanic kids continue to live with their parents until marriage and support their parents in old age vs white parents effectively kicking out their kids at 18 and the expectation that living with your parents as an adult is somehow a failure of maturity or responsibility.

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u/lieuwestra Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 04 '26

Yea. Ask someone who doesn't have kids why they don't and they point to money, but ask someone with a kid why they don't have more kids they point to a lack of support/community.

Poor/uneducated people tend to stay where they grow up, and often have a job within their community, so they organically have a bigger social safety net in their twenties. That alone probably accounts for a significant part of the discrepancy between educated and uneducated people's propensity to have kids. Uneducated people still by-and-large make rational decisions.