Women want more children than they’re having. America can do more to help

In the wake of the media storm generated by Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s comment about “childless cat ladies,” fertility in America has vaulted to the top of the national conversation, with good reason.
The fertility rate has hit a record low in the United States, with the average American woman now expected to have just 1.6 births in her lifetime, well below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1 babies per woman. The share of women hitting the end of their childbearing years without having had any children is on the rise, such that about 1 in 6 women in their 40s are childless. And new projections by demographer Lyman Stone suggest that today’s young men and women will experience unprecedented levels of childlessness, with about 1 in 4 of them never having children.
In other words, we’re headed to a world where there will be lots of childless ladies and gentlemen, with or without cats and dogs.
But just because fertility is falling and childlessness is rising does not mean this state of family affairs is what most women want. Even today, most young women say they would like to have a family. Among women under 35 today, 30% already have children, 41% say they want to have children, 15% are not sure, and only 14% say they don’t wish to have children, according to a new Institute for Family Studies/YouGov survey of 2,000 young adults conducted in May to June of 2024.
In fact, the number of children American women hope to have hasn’t changed much in the past few decades, with their ideal fertility remaining consistently at slightly more than two children per woman. For many women, then, the desire for children is there, but other factors are coming into play.
To be sure, some women (and men) are steering clear of children for more hedonistic reasons. In explaining why she is childless, Beth Davis, a marketing professional, told The Wall Street Journal that she and her husband “have more time and energy to commit to ourselves,” along with more money to spend on nice restaurants, a new BMW and high-end gym memberships.
But the problem for many other women is that they are finding it difficult to have the children they had hoped to have. Indeed, the gap between women’s desired and realized fertility is growing.
There are many reasons behind this gap: from difficulties in conceiving to a cultural shift away from valuing family and toward careerism, among others. However, a recent Institute for Family Studies/Wheatley Institute survey suggests the biggest factors are not careers or infertility. They are marriage- and money-related.
In looking at women aged 18-55 whose desired fertility is greater than the number of children they currently have, the survey found the top two reasons for not reaching their desired fertility are either the lack of a suitable spouse/partner or the inability to afford (more) children, with 36% of women in this group citing each of these reasons. For childless women in this group, the lack of a spouse or partner is especially important, with 55% citing it as the reason they haven’t had the children they had hoped to have.
Taken together, this research suggests large numbers of young women today will not become mothers or will not have the children they wish to have. This is especially tragic for women who end up involuntarily childless. Even though motherhood gets a bad rap today — one writer in The New York Times said, for instance, that “Married heterosexual motherhood in America … is a game no one wins” — the empirical evidence tells us that mothers are typically happier, less lonely and report more meaningful lives than their childless peers.
More than 80% of mothers aged 18-55 are happy with their lives today, compared to 68% of women without children. And women who are married with children are the happiest group of women, according to the most recent data from the 2022 General Social Survey. Moreover, mothers report markedly higher levels of meaning in their lives and less loneliness, compared to women without children.
But the benefits of motherhood seem to extend beyond happiness. Recent research suggests that children are associated with an increased lifespan for women. Compared with childless women, mothers who reach the age of 60 have a 1.5-year longer life expectancy than their childless peers. What’s more: The evidence suggests that mothers are also markedly less likely to commit suicide. One study found that women who had children had about 60% lower odds of committing suicide, compared to childless peers. Having kids, it would seem, gives women something extra to live for.
Given the benefits of motherhood for women, and the fact most young women today still want to have a family, we should direct our focus on helping women overcome what appear to be the two biggest obstacles to childbearing: marriage and money.
On the marriage front, Americans need to create a culture that devotes as much attention to getting young adults to date with an eye to marriage as it does to getting them launched into a career. Colleges, churches and companies, for instance, should do more to encourage and facilitate dating among their young adults — like The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Church Educational System has done with sponsored “Date Nights” featuring food and fun activities.
The federal government should also get rid of policies that financially penalize young adults who would like to marry. The “marriage penalty” is real. One survey found that 11% of unmarried lower-income adults cited the potential loss of government benefits like Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit and food stamps as a reason they haven’t tied the knot.
On the affordability front, to reduce the financial hit parents incur from having children, the federal government should expand the child tax credit to $400 per month for kids under 5 and $250 for school-age children. More generally, we need more pro-family policies to help parents and give more young women the confidence to take the leap into motherhood.
In our efforts to make the world more friendly to mothers, we must avoid belittling, hectoring or demeaning childless women. Instead, we should underline the ways in which children are sources of incalculable meaning, hope, happiness and love for so many of us. Making America more supportive of marriage and motherhood could not be more important if we aim to maximize the odds — for women who are open to having them — that today’s young women have the opportunity of receiving one of life’s greatest gifts, the gift of a child.
Wendy Wang (@WendyRWang on X) is director of research at the Institute for Family Studies. Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS on X), a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, is the Future of Freedom Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and the author of “Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization.”