One of the biggest factors that could help in reversing trends — a factor with zero cost attached — is kindness. Encouraging words. Letting prospective parents know they’re supported.
Social influencers matter, too.
The Pew Research Center found that the U.S. fertility rate hit a historic low with 1.60 children per woman in 2024.
The replacement level is widely considered 2.1 children per woman in a “low-mortality” country.
More recent data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) showed a continued decline in births from 3,628,934 in 2024 to 3,612,012 in 2025.
Pew Research numbers show Christian groups to be slightly above the norm with 2.3 children per woman for Evangelical Protestants and 2.2 for Christians overall.
That’s not only true for Christians.
“If you look in New York City, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population there has six kids each (couple), and their hipster neighbors have 1.6 or less,” Dr. Lyman Stone, of the Institute for Family Studies, said on “Washington Watch” last week.
Those numbers make it clear that even with an expensive address, having fewer children is as much a cultural decision as an economic one.
“We wanted to understand that better,” Stone told show host Jody Hice.
Stone’s group surveyed more than 10,000 people across a dozen countries asking barrel full of questions about the factors that shape ideas in family planning. What drives decisions?
“We all know that cultural factors matter, but it's not good enough to say, ‘oh, it's culture.’ We need to actually say what it is about culture so that we can know how to create more pro-family cultures that give us more babies,” Stone said.
One of the biggest takeaways is that in family planning, encouragement from friends and family makes a world of difference.
Believing one’s friends would celebrate a new baby is associated with a 10% increase in the desired number of children and a 20% increase in the likelihood of intending to have another child.
Affirmation from parents leads to an 11% increase in the desired number of children and a 30% increase in the likelihood of intending to have another child.
“We found that people were actually very sensitive to the opinions of their social peers, so people who thought that their friends were going to celebrate a new baby, were about 20 percent likelier to say that they were intending to have another child. That’s a huge difference, basically, for the price of a party,” Stone said.
Material aid like meal trains or helping to babysit were actually less important than just showing moral support, the survey found.
That type of financial assistance from parents did motivate some young adults in family planning.
“But we found that actually one of the biggest factors was just parents who were willing to talk to their adult children and say, ‘Hey, we hope you give us grandkids. We’d love to share that part of life with you,’” he said.
Prospective parents also pay attention to celebrity families.
“Celebrities, people they admired … if they had bigger families, those (planning) people wanted bigger families. What all this adds up to is to basically say that advertising works,” Stone said.
