America Is Quietly Disappearing. Our Generation Will Decide Whether It Comes Back.
The New American Family
“The fertility rate just hit a new record low. The reasons say more about our culture than our economy — and the fix won’t come from Washington.”
If you take a stroll through any American small town, you will see it: the silent playgrounds, the shuttered schools, and the vacant storefronts. This is no illusion. Our nation is becoming older and more hollow, not due to the ravages of famine or war, but because our youth have simply stopped having children.
If you are reading this, you belong to a generation that might fail to sustain its own numbers. In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the American fertility rate plummeted to 1.6 children per woman in 2025, marking an all-time low for the nation. With a replacement level of 2.1 required for national survival, we are falling significantly short, and the downward trend shows no signs of reversing.
It is tempting to dismiss this as a problem for demographers, or for politicians 30 years from now. It is not. A country that stops having children stops paying into Social Security, stops filling its military ranks, stops staffing its hospitals and stops believing in its own future. The Department of Defense has already begun warning that fewer young Americans means fewer recruits, fewer soldiers and a smaller force facing rising threats from China, Russia and Iran. Every empty cradle today is an empty barracks tomorrow.
Population is the foundation. Demographics serve as the bedrock upon which our economy, defense, and culture are built. While previous generations debated the best methods for national expansion, our generation is facing a more fundamental, unspoken question: do we believe our nation has a future worth preserving?
HOW WE GOT HERE
The causes are not mysterious, and they are not primarily economic. They are cultural — the predictable result of telling a generation, over and over, that family is a burden and self-actualization is the point of life.
Start with marriage. The American marriage rate has fallen roughly 65 percent since 1970. Just 23 percent of 25-year-old women and 20 percent of 25-year-old men have ever been married — close to the lowest level on record. The Institute for Family Studies projects that one in three Americans turning 45 in 2050 will never marry at all. Marriage is the institution that produces stable families, and stable families are the institution that produces children. When one collapses, the other follows.
Then there is the career-first ideology sold to young women as liberation. The U.S. Census Bureau now reports that 63 percent of women ages 25 to 29 are childless, up from 50 percent a decade ago. Pew Research found that 44 percent of childfree adults under 50 say they want to focus on their career or other interests instead. For the first time in American history, women in their 30s have more children than women in their 20s. The biological catch-up rarely happens. Demographers warn that millennials and older Gen Z would need an unprecedented birth rate in their late 30s and 40s just to match their grandparents.
Furthermore, youth today have internalised a pervasive cultural narrative, championed by progressive leaders and modern media, that portrays parenthood as an act of vanity, a financial drain, or even an ethical failing. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told her millions of Instagram followers in 2019 that “there’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” and that young people now face a “legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?” The message landed. Twenty-six percent of childfree adults under 50 now cite environmental concerns as a major reason for not having kids, according to Pew — more than four times the rate among older Americans. A generation has been told, in effect, that the noblest thing it can do for the planet is to not exist. It is hard to imagine a more anti-human worldview, and it is hard to imagine how a country built on the opposite premise can survive it.
Add the two-income trap. As women entered the workforce en masse, housing prices simply absorbed the second income. Visual Capitalist reports the median home price has risen roughly 198 percent in inflation-adjusted terms since 1970. Families today need two paychecks to buy the same house their parents bought on one. The result is not more freedom for women; it is a country in which neither parent can afford to stay home with a child, and in which couples postpone children until the math works — which it never quite does.
And finally, the screens. One in four Gen Z adults have never had partnered sex, according to research from the Kinsey Institute. Dating apps were built to maximize swipes, not marriages. The bars, churches and community groups that once introduced young men and women to each other have hollowed out. Weekly worship attendance has fallen from 42 percent of Americans to 30 percent in the last 20 years. Researcher Ryan Burge has shown that nearly the entire U.S. fertility decline from 2012 to 2019 can be explained by religious decline alone. The institutions that once produced families have been replaced by algorithms that produce loneliness.
WHY THIS IS OUR FIGHT
This is, fundamentally, a conservative problem to solve. The progressive movement spent the last 60 years dismantling the institutions — marriage, family, faith, community — that made American life sustainable. They are not going to rebuild what they tore down. They cannot even bring themselves to admit it was worth having.
Every cause described above is, in principle, reversible. None will be reversed by a federal program. The pro-natal cash incentives that South Korea and Hungary have tried for years have barely moved the needle. This is not a policy problem with a policy solution. It is a culture problem, and it will only be solved by a generation that decides to live differently than the one before it.
That generation is ours.
WHAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY DO
Get married — and mean it. Stop treating marriage as a capstone you complete after the career, the house and the savings account. Treat it as the foundation you build the rest of your life on. The data are clear: married couples have more children, more wealth and more happiness than their unmarried peers. Almost everything good in adult life flows downstream from a stable marriage.
Having children earlier is fashionable. The advice you have been given — wait, travel, establish yourself first — was written by people who did not understand how fertility actually works. The 20s are the easiest years to have kids, and they are the years our culture tells you to spend on yourself. Reject that. The grandparents waiting to meet your children are not waiting forever.
Put down the phone. Join a church. Join a club. Coach a team. Show up. Real relationships — the ones that lead to marriage and family — almost never start on an app. They start in person, in community, around shared purpose. A generation raised on screens will only learn to love in spite of them.
Reject the doom narrative. The planet is not ending in 12 years. Children are not a carbon footprint. They are the only reason any of this — the country, the culture, the conservative movement itself — has a future. Optimism about the future is not naive. It is the precondition for having one.
Our national decline is not a result of external threats, but of our own failure to perform the fundamental duty of any civilization: self-perpetuation. While the solution is straightforward, it requires a radical departure from modern norms. We must reclaim the conviction of our grandparents, who understood that the future was worth the sacrifice, and commit ourselves to the next generation—both for their sake and to honor those who came before us.
Be countercultural.