While the Trump administration is eyeing ways to persuade people to marry and have children, any efforts to bump up America’s birth rate could come up against Gen Z, whose members were born between 1997 and 2013 and many of whom say that starting their own family is less of a priority than it was for earlier generations. 

A new Harvard Youth Poll finds that just 48 percent of young adults say having children is important — the lowest ranking among six “life goals” measured in a survey of 2,096 Americans between ages 18 and 29. Topping the list is achieving financial security, with 86 percent of young adults saying it is important to them. The pollsters point to “a generational shift away from traditional family formation.”

The findings come amid a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It discloses that the United States fertility rate in 2024 stood at 54.6 births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age, hovering near the record-low in 2023 and well below rates from previous years. 

“Demand for children — how desirable they are in the basket of goods — has definitely collapsed,” economist Catherine Pakaluk, who wrote a book about the birth dearth, tells the Sun. This decline in demand is fueled by perceptions that the cost of bearing children has risen in “a short-term price shock,” she says, similar to how high housing prices correlate to reduced housing demand. 

Concerns about the downward trend in the birth rate have led President Trump and allies like Elon Musk and JD Vance to float such proposals as a $5,000 “baby bonus” that would be given to every American mother after she gives birth. Yet while economic incentives could improve the prospect of parenthood for those who are already interested in it, they might not address a decades-long erosion in the centrality of the American nuclear family ideal.

“The sense that a child is really important for your life — that’s fallen over time,” Professor Pakaluk says. Religion is critical to this calculus: Lower levels of Biblical faith correlate with less interest in childbearing, she says, given that the Abrahamic religions centralize procreation as one of the purposes of marriage.  

Today, almost half of Gen Z claims religion isn’t important, according to Pew Research Center, and more than one-third are religiously unaffiliated. “The current generation grew up in a set of public schools that were way more against religion than the public schools their parents grew up in,” Professor Pakaluk says. 

A decline in childbearing rates traces back to the mid-1960s, fueled by a confluence of social, economic, and technological factors, including increased access to contraception. In 1965, American families had an average of 2.44 children. The Census Bureau projects a rate of 1.62 births per woman in 2025, well below replacement level fertility of 2.1 children per woman.

Yet Gen Z is not monolithic in its views on family. While young adults generally lean progressive, a rising conservative cohort is enthusiastically espousing more traditional attitudes toward marriage and family.

The Harvard Youth Poll discloses that having children is considered an important goal for 69 percent of young Republicans surveyed, compared to 43 percent of young Democrats surveyed. It also finds that getting married is important to 75 percent of young Republicans, compared to 56 percent of young Democrats.

“These traditional values have become part of the cornerstone of this young conservative movement,” journalist Rachel Janfaza, who runs a newsletter covering youth political culture, tells The New York Sun. “Young conservatives feel like those values make them a conservative.” They comprise a pro-family movement on the political right that is intent on combatting declining birth rates. 

Meanwhile, young progressives are more likely to list concerns over the cost of living and broader issues such as climate change as reasons why they may not want to have children, Ms. Janfaza says. For the college-educated elite, also at play is a growing emphasis on “workism,” the idea that work is the central focus of one’s identity and life’s purpose. 

Even for those who want children, there are “concerns about being able to have a career, being able to balance the two,” a 21-year-old junior at Harvard, Rachael Dziaba, and the senior researcher behind the Harvard survey, told Ms. Janfaza. “There are a lot of people who feel that society is pressuring women to do both, to do everything.”

Some who transition to parenthood later in life and hit a fertility window might not be able to have as many children as they would want. Professor Pakaluk says that she has “so many friends” that have two children and “a hundred percent would’ve had more. But because they started at 37, they were like, shoot, I wish I had known I was going to like this so much,” says Professor Pakaluk, herself a mother of eight.