The Left’s Family Problem: Marriage and Kids Cratering Among Liberal Young Adults

The Left has a family problem—actually, multiple family problems. Progressive messaging that devalues, denies, and deconstructs the value of family life and celebrates solo living in recent years is leaving its mark on the hearts, minds, and lives of young liberals. After being sold various messages that include, “Married heterosexual motherhood in America… is a game no one wins” (in The New York Times), or “Divorce led me to my happily ever after” (in The Washington Post), or “Women who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids are Getting Richer” (in Bloomberg), or “Why Are Many Single Women Without Children So Happy?” (in Psychology Today), too many young adults, especially young women on the Left, now view marriage and family as not for them or, at least, not their top priority.

A “Midas Mindset” on the Left

Instead, they are often leaning into a “Midas Mindset” that prioritizes making money, education, and, especially, career. Work is viewed as the source and summit of a meaningful and happy life. Focusing on love, marriage, and starting a family, by contrast, does not merit nearly the same devotion. A recent NBC News poll found, for instance, that Gen Zers (18-29) who voted for Kamala Harris, especially women, ranked getting married and having children almost dead last in their “personal definition of success.” Instead, women gave top billing to “Having a job or career you find fulfilling” (#1), or “Having enough money to do the things you want to do” (#2). 

The NBC poll is consistent with other surveys indicating that liberals generally place a markedly lower value on marriage, childbearing, and family—both in theory and practice—nowadays. Progressive skepticism towards marriage and family life is not just about the Midas Mindset, it’s also rooted in the idea that family places undue burdens on women—think, for instance, of the recent UN ad by actress Anne Hathaway, decrying the global “imbalance” in unpaid care between women and men. Being free of family encumbrances, then, is often held up as an important pathway to living a meaningful and happy life for women. As writer Glynnis MacNicol recently put it in the New York Times, a family-free life often opens up “avenues that are as satisfying or more satisfying or lead to a happier, more fulfilled life” for women today.  

The ways in which marriage and family life are too often discounted, devalued, or denigrated on the Left have consequences. Focusing on the partisan manifestation of these differences, Gallup recently noted that:

after decades of little partisan difference, a gap in the marriage rates of Republicans and Democrats cracked open in the 1980s and has widened in the past quarter century. Although demographic differences between Republicans and Democrats and changes in economic conditions might account for some of this, differences in attitudes about the importance and benefits of marriage—with Republicans valuing it more than Democrats—appear to be the much bigger factor.

A Family-First Mindset on the Right

Meanwhile, conservatives have been more likely to embrace a “family first” mindset that puts a premium on marriage and childbearing. The most recent prominent apostle on the Right for family was the late Charlie Kirk, who said that “Having a family will change your life in the best ways, so get married and have kids. You won’t regret it.” The recently assassinated founder of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) also told young adults that embracing “careerism and consumerism” at the expense of starting a family in your 20s is a big mistake. “Having children is more important than having a good career … my kids matter more than how many social media followers I have,” Kirk said on Fox News, just two days before he was killed. 

This message isn’t just coming from TPUSA: many of the most popular podcast hosts and influencers on the Right—from Ben Shapiro and Allie Beth Stuckey to Matt Walsh and Brett Cooper—regularly deliver messages to their audiences celebrating the joys of marriage and parenthood. Meanwhile, rising stars in the broader conservative firmament, from Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary to the billionaire Lucky Palmer, are confessing that they wish they had married their wives earlier. And a growing crop of twentysomething conservative female influencers like Riley Gaines and Isabel Brown can be found celebrating young marriage and motherhood. “There’s nothing that could’ve prepared me for a love like this. God has blessed us beyond belief. Welcome to the world, sweet Margot,” Gaines recently wrote, after giving birth to her first child.

The bigger point is that the new media on the Right is building a family-first “plausibility structure” that now competes with the Left’s less-than-family-friendly messaging in the mainstream media, the Ivory Tower, and online. In the Right’s plausibility structure, family is idealized, conservatives are exposed to the values and virtues that are supposed to make marriages strong and stable, and young adults are being directed to communities that prioritize family-first living: evangelical and Catholic churches, in particular.

The emergence of this family-first plausibility structure helps explain the enduring appeal of marriage and family among conservative Gen Zers, especially young men on the right. That NBC News poll of Gen Zers reported, for instance, that young men who voted for Trump in 2024 listed parenthood (#1) and marriage (#4) as some of their top life priorities, the opposite of young women on the Left. A recent survey from Demographic Intelligence spotlighted by Scott Yenor and Lyman Stone found that “conservative women want more children and they’re likelier to marry, and to marry young.” This family orientation on the Right also aligns well with what looks like a potential upswing in churchgoing among Gen Z men, given that religion is seen as a pillar of family-first living and a good place to find a mate for many conservatives.

Ideology and Family Life Among Today's Young Adults

But what is the connection between ideology and marriage and parenthood among today’s young adults? 

This Institute for Family Studies (IFS) report answers this question by exploring the links between ideology and two outcomes from the 1980s to the present: 1) ever-married status for men and women ages 25-35 and 2) having ever had a child for men and women ages 25-35. Obviously, getting married and starting a family depends on more than a cultural commitment—it also depends on socioeconomic and social factors like education, money, attractiveness, and social skills. Indeed, much of the scholarship on marriage in America focuses on the class divide, given that college-educated and affluent Americans have had greater success getting and staying married in recent years. It’s also harder today, as Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox noted in The Atlantic, to find a mate to marry who shares your worldview, given that a large minority of single Gen Z women have moved to the Left even as a substantial minority of single Gen Z men have moved Right.

By delaying and foregoing family formation, the Left seems poised to lose ground in American life. This should worry liberals.

Nevertheless, we hypothesize that there is a growing divide in family formation among today’s young adults that cuts along ideological lines. This is, in part, because family-first messaging on the Right has been especially pronounced in new media since COVID, as conservative intellectuals and influencers reacted to what they saw as the excesses of the Woke Left, and the emotional and existential vacuity of single living. It’s also because leftwing messaging emanating from legacy cultural institutions took a precipitously antifamily turn in the wake of the Great Awokening, reflected in dramatic declines in support for marriage on the Left. Because ideological leaders on the Left and Right have been pushing divergent conceptions of the good life, vis-à-vis family, we predict that the ideological divide in marriage and childbearing among young men and women is growing, especially in the last decade or so.

Getting Married Younger

We used the General Social Survey (GSS), administered by NORC at the University of Chicago, to examine marriage and fertility patterns among Americans ages 25 to 35 by political ideology. We found a growing divergence between conservatives and liberals, both men and women. For this analysis, we coded adults who identified in the GSS as “extremely conservative,” “conservative,” or “slightly conservative” as conservatives; we coded adults who identified as “extremely liberal,” “liberal,” or “slightly liberal” as liberals. Moderates, who make up about one-third of American young adults, are excluded from our analysis of early marriage and childbearing in this report.

Marriage rates were higher in the 1980s, with Americans on both sides of the ideological aisle tying the knot at similar rates by the time they hit adulthood. But even then, conservatives tended to marry earlier. The GSS tells us that, among adults ages 25-35, 74% of conservative men and 83% of conservative women were married in the 80s, compared to 61% of liberal men and 75% of liberal women. The marriage gap between conservative and liberal young adults was just over 10 percentage points back then.

Since the 1980s, marriage rates have declined for both conservatives and liberals. But the declines have been greater among liberals, for both men and women. Pooling data from 2021, 2022, and 2024, we found the largest gap to date between conservatives and liberals in the share of women ages 25 to 35 ever married in the 2020s. For this decade, there was a 16-percentage point difference between young conservative women compared to young liberal women in the share ever married, at 60% and 44%, respectively. 

This growing marriage gap is visible among men, too. In recent years, GSS data show the share of ever-married conservative men ages 25 to 35 returning to levels seen in 2000, at 57 percent. Young liberal men, on the other hand, marry at lower rates than they did in the 2000s, with 35% having ever married in the 2020s. This represents a 22-percentage point marriage gap between young conservative men and their liberal peers for the 2020s.

Having Children

Just as conservatives are marrying at higher rates, they are also more likely to have children during young adulthood. Indeed, we don’t see a large decline in the share of conservatives ages 25 to 35 who are parents from the 1990s to the present.

But we do see a large decline in parenthood among liberal young adults. In the 1980s, 65% of conservative women ages 25-35 reported having children. Young liberal women in the 1980s weren’t far behind, with 60% reporting the same. Since then, childbearing has plummeted among liberal women. In the 2020s, just 40% of liberal women between ages 25 and 35 report being parents, down from 51% in the 2010s. By comparison, conservative women in this age range saw no statistically significant change: in the 2020s, 71% report being parents. This means there is a 31-percentage point gap between young conservative women and their liberal peers today.

The story is similar for men. Young conservative men reported having children at a 12-percentage point higher rate than liberal men in the 1980s, at 59% and 47%, respectively. This gap expanded by the 2010s, and in the present decade, we see the widest gap to-date: 47% of conservative men in this age group report ever having children, compared to just 22% of liberal men—a 25 percentage-point difference. In the last decade, then, a chasm has opened up between conservative and liberal young men and women in the share who have had children.

The Marriage and Parenthood Divide

The growing marriage and parent divide may be partly due to ideological polarization among America’s youth. As both ends of the spectrum take up more partisan views on marriage and children, we may witness sorting along these lines, with marriage-minded adults moving Right and less-familistic adults moving Left.

We find this polarization hypothesis most plausible for young women, who have shifted markedly to the Left over the past two decades. In 1980, 31% of women ages 25-35 were liberal and 28% were conservative. Into the 1990s and 2000s, an even split between conservative and liberal young women persisted. But in the 2010s, young women began leaning to Left, with 32% identifying as liberal and 25% as conservative. The current decade is seeing a further shift left for young women: 36% identify as liberal, and 22% identify as conservative.

Marriage and birth rates among conservative women may be propped up by this polarization. The shrinking minority of women who identify as conservative may represent a devoted core who are especially family minded. Particularly with parenthood, which has seen no statistically significant change among young conservative women since at least the 1980s, the lack of decline may be explained by an exodus of less family-minded women towards ideological liberalism.

On the other hand, we do not see young men swinging towards one ideological view over the other. In the 1980s, 34% of men between 25 and 35 years old identified as conservative, and 32% identified as liberal. Today, 31% identify as conservative and 34% as liberal. The growing family divide between young conservative men and liberal men is likely not explained by selection effects along ideological lines.

What the Left is Losing 

This Institute for Family Studies analysis finds that marriage and childbearing are declining for young adults across the nation but are falling precipitously among young women and men on the Left. “Increasingly, young people from progressive and liberal circles are finding it harder to navigate the question of whether or not to have children, one of the most important personal decisions they’re going to be making in their lives,” as the philosopher Anastasia Berg, herself a liberal, has noted.

By contrast, for young men and women who lean Right, family is more likely to be viewed as an unalloyed good, and marriage and family formation are much more robust. Indeed, in the 2020s, a majority of conservative young adults ages 25-35 have married and become parents, whereas only a minority of liberal young adults have done likewise. What’s more: the divide in family formation between the Left and Right appears to be growing. 

We attribute this divide in large part to how mainstream institutions in education, media, and the pop culture have advanced a Midas Mindset that prioritizes an individualistic ethos focused on personal development, hedonism, and, especially, career. This mindset has led many young adults on the Left to postpone or forego family life. And despite the social maladies that come with low birth rates, the Left “continues to steer clear of the topic” because birth rates are seen as an “inherently conservative concern,” writes John Burn-Murdoch.

On the other hand, a family-first mindset is resurgent on Right-leaning new media platforms and organizations like the Daily Wire and Turning Point USA, as well as many of the nation’s top conservative podcasters. They view getting married and having children as the best ways to forge a meaningful and happy life, and to avoid the plagues of loneliness, anxiety, and depression sweeping young adulthood in America.

Indeed, one reason liberal adults are less happy and more likely to report that they are lonely, as we noted in earlier research, is that they are less likely to be married with children. Many commentators on the Left are oblivious to the fact that their embrace of a more individualistic, career-focused pathway is leaving scores of young adults in their community vulnerable to lives marked by more loneliness, less meaning, and greater unhappiness. By contrast, if liberals were to “throw themselves into social institutions” like the family, as I noted in The New York Times, they would “have just as great a shot at happiness as people on the Right.”

But the costs of the Left’s devaluation of family are not just psychic. They are also social, political, and civilizational. By delaying and foregoing family formation, the Left seems poised to lose ground in American life. This should worry liberals, as Berg has pointed out, because a progressive future depends upon bearing and raising progressive children: 

We also have to realize that the possibility of a better future is conditioned on the possibility of having a future at all. That means, some people have to be having children. And if you want those children to share in the values that you yourself hold, you probably want some of those people to be the kind of people that you yourself are.

Right now, the United States is witnessing a precipitous decline in the number of children born. But this decline is most prominent among liberal parents and in liberal states. Fertility is higher in red America, families are leaving blue states for red ones in greater numbers, and, as Berg might predict, the population of children is falling in blue states and rising in red ones.

The partisan family divide is most clearly visible at the extreme ends. The 10 states with the highest margin of victory for Trump in the most recent presidential election saw an 11% decline in their aggregate birth rate from 2001 to 2024. On the other hand, the 10 states that saw the highest margins for Harris had a 25% decrease in their aggregate birth rate. This is bad news for both Republican and Democratic states, but Democratic states are getting hit hardest.

Coupled with migration, we get a picture of differing demographic trajectories. Since 2000, those states where Trump won the popular vote in 2024 saw a 7.3% increase in their aggregate child population. This contrasts to those states where Harris won the popular vote, which saw a 7.1% decrease in aggregate child population. 

Real-World Consequences

We are witnessing the real-world consequences of an ideological divide where the Right prioritizes marriage and childbearing and the Left discounts them in fertility and population shifts across America. If the Left wishes to build a “better future,” it must show up for that future by reconsidering its thinking, messaging, and devotion to the nation’s most important institution: the family.  

Brad Wilcox is Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, senior 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. Grant Bailey is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies.