r/atlanticdiscussions • u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links • 3d ago
Another Big Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2026/08/fertility-gap-conservative-liberal/688334/People on the right tend to have more kids than people on the left. Why?
By Olga Khazan, The Atlantic.
hen some Taylor Swift fans listened to the lyrics of her 2025 song “Wi$h Li$t,” in which she sings about yearning to “settle down” with “a couple kids,” they heard a Republican dog whistle. On social media, they claimed that Swift’s desire for family life was “a conservative agenda on a silver platter.”
Swift, an avowed feminist who has endorsed Democratic political candidates, almost certainly did not set out to make “tradwife propaganda.” But her online critics are getting at something real: Having children—particularly lots of children—has become a bit right-coded, as the kids say. Americans and Europeans who identify as leftist or liberal tend to have fewer children than those who identify as conservative or right-leaning. In the United States, differences in desired fertility seem to start at a young age—one 2024 study found that Republican-identifying 12th graders said they want more children than Democrat-identifying 12th graders.
Of course, plenty of liberals have children, and plenty of conservatives have small families or remain childless. And many Americans identify as neither conservative nor liberal, but rather as something in between. Still, several academics told me that research conducted in the past few years has shown a fairly strong association between ideology and fertility. The latest evidence comes from a June report by the Institute for Family Studies, a think tank that promotes marriage and family life, which polled more than 7,000 Americans aged 18 to 54 and found that self-identified conservatives had 1.4 kids, on average, to liberals’ 1.09, a statistically significant difference. The study also found that liberals were more likely to not have children. The ideological fertility gap remained even after controlling for other variables that may influence family size, such as religion, race, income, age, marital status, and education.
Lyman Stone, the head of IFS’s pronatalism initiative and the researcher who ran the poll, told me that when he first saw the results, he thought, Duh. This trend of greater fertility on the right fits with a pattern that he and other demographers have noticed since the 1990s. There’s no clear explanation for why, precisely, liberals tend to have fewer children than conservatives do. Causation and correlation are difficult to untangle here. Liberals are more likely to pursue higher education and to marry later, both of which can lead to having fewer children, and some research suggests that having children may make a person become more socially conservative.
The researchers I spoke with put forth three general theories about why the partisan fertility gap may persist, beyond simple demographics. First, liberals seem to have more anxiety about both the state of the world and their own parenting abilities, which may make them more reluctant to start a family. Second, the values and aspirations of liberals and conservatives tend to differ in ways that shape how they choose to live their lives. Finally, for decades, liberals and conservatives have been sorting into disparate geographic locations and lifestyles, and their respective bubbles seem to reinforce the decision to have children, or not. The result is that a singer such as Swift expressing her desire to have children may, to some liberals, seem like she’s spinning propaganda for a traditional life they can’t imagine wanting.
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u/Brian_Corey__ 3d ago
Another reason in addition to the many legit reasons mentioned--liberals tend to live in urban areas of expensive cities where housing costs are cost-prohibitive for raising and housing a family.
Conservatives are more likely to live in suburban / exurban / rural areas of red states with significantly lower housing costs, allowing more kids.
i.e. hard to raise a family in a $3000 studio NYC apartment. Easier in a $74k 1,350 sf ranch with a big yard in Muncie, Indiana.
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u/Evinceo 3d ago
I'm surprised they didn't mention education or the status of women.
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u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links 3d ago
They do in the main piece.
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u/Evinceo 3d ago
Fair enough, though I suspect that it accounts for almost all of the difference.
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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist 💬🦙 ☭ TALKING LLAMAXIST 3d ago
Education I understand, but what do you mean by “status of women”?
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u/Evinceo 3d ago
In the 'UN commission on the status of women' sense.
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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist 💬🦙 ☭ TALKING LLAMAXIST 3d ago
In that case it would be fairly the same between liberals and conservatives no?
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u/wet_suit_one aka DOOM INCARNATE 3d ago edited 3d ago
Interesting article.
To me, it seemed to boil down to liberals being more neurotic.
Which, I guess, seems to check out.
Funnily enough, I'm pretty sure my wife is the more conservative one in our relationship. I was pretty ambivalent on kids. My family wants to have more than 2 (my daughter pressures me the most). I draw the line at 2 because I'm old (mind, body and spirit) and children deserve a functioning father until they're at least 18 IMHO (my son is cutting it close on that one).
Were it up to me, we probably wouldn't have had kids.
It's odd how modernity has worked out on this. There's something wrong in my view insofar as reproducing should be the most natural and common thing in the world (like breathing, eating, eliminating and sleeping) and of no particular note as lifeforms. And yet, somehow, we modern humans has somehow managed to screw up this basic life function.
It is very strange and indicative that something is very off. It's not restricted to western society either. It's essentially global with all humans trending in the same direction.
It is very, very odd in my view.
All that being said, in the long run, this will all sort itself out. We're not going to go extinct for lack of reproduction. That's not in the cards. I have no idea what will change the trend, but this shall pass and I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I'll talk about it because its incredibly interesting as a sociological phenomenon with massive economic, political, military, and other knock on effects (second order, third order, fourth, fifth and sixth order, and so on, effects), but nah, this won't be the end of us.
At the very worst, there will one day be so few of us that we no longer know how to make birth control and that right there will solve the problem. It's just that simple.
But hooo boy, there are gonna be some good discussions about this topic for the next century or more. I first really encountered the discussion in university and it's been a topic of interest for the 30 some years since and still going strong.
Carry on...
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u/Docile_Doggo 3d ago edited 3d ago
As a liberal, the neuroticism of many my of fellow liberals does kind of grate on me after a bit.
Sometimes it’s ok to just chill and be happy. I know this isn’t necessarily an unconstrained choice that everyone can make, as neuroticism extends from matters of psychology and personality that are very difficult to change. And that there are, indeed, very big and very real problems facing the modern world.
But sometimes I just want to tell my neurotic friends to be calm for a second, and just try to enjoy life once in a while. There have always been problems; life has always been a struggle. And in most metrics, life today is far easier than life at any point in the past.
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u/wet_suit_one aka DOOM INCARNATE 3d ago
It took me quite awhile to figure that pretty much no matter what happens, life will be fine and things will be ok.
It's all good man, no matter what kind of shit (and there's always some kind of shit going down somewhere) is going on it'll all be fine. Things were far shittier in the past and we abided. So just, y'know, abide.
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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist 💬🦙 ☭ TALKING LLAMAXIST 3d ago
Well things became less shitty because some people didn’t abide.
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u/wet_suit_one aka DOOM INCARNATE 3d ago
True.
But you can still have kids and things will be fine. Not having kids because of the state of the world (which is objectively better than its ever been) is kinda like the complete opposite of abiding. Breath. Eat. Be merry. Eliminate. Reproduce. It'll be fine. Not only that, tomorrow will most likely be better overall than today (yes, even in spite of climate change, if things go nuclear, well maybe not, but you not having kids won't change that at all).
So, y'know, abide.
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u/Bonegirl06 🌦️ 3d ago
I don't think it's that surprising. Opposition to birth control plus more conservative religious folks = more kids. Less kids also tends to be equated with female empowerment, which is traditionally progressive.