The American family is in trouble and has been for some time. A brief survey of the numbers demonstrates this. Declining birthrates are observed in the total fertility rate (TFR) which saw its peak at 3.8 children per woman in 1957 during the post Second World War baby boom compared to 2023, when the rate fell to an alarming historic low of 1.6. A temporary blip in statistics isn’t too much to worry about, but an ongoing trend has cumulative adverse effects on nearly every facet of society. A diminishing work force slows economic growth, brings in less tax revenue to pay for basic services and healthcare, and increases the dependency ratio in our work force where more elderly outnumber far too few incoming younger workers to replace them. Nearly anything from consumer goods, volunteer military service, and school enrollment eventually takes a hit. If you plot out the trajectory of a negative birth rate long enough, it essentially spells the slow death of a society. It becomes unsustainable in the long run.
To make sense of these numbers, a birthrate of 2.1 is considered the bare minimum to replace a country’s population. This is reflected, most naturally, in the size of the family and in the boundaries of what constitutes a family. The conception of the nuclear family—a husband, his wife, and their children—began to reign supreme following the Second World War, which was a generation that was more economically prosperous and independent from their extended family and increasingly cared primarily for their immediate kin compared to their predecessors. According to census data, the 1960s enjoyed another high of a household of 3.7, while that has since declined to 3.13.
As those numbers appear flatly on a spreadsheet, that doesn’t sound so worrying. But there are more ingredients in the mix that complicate this. For example, the number of the children who have been aborted between 1973 and the end of Roe v. Wade in 2022 was at least 62.8 million. From 1990 alone, there has been an estimated 87.7 million illegal immigrants enter the United States. Some get deported, some eventually become citizens, and some die of natural causes, but one thing is for certain, the immigration numbers artificially keep the U.S. birth rate from slumping because of their steady influx. Other factors are also worthy to note: overall, Americans aren’t just having few kids, but waiting longer in life to have them. They are prizing their single years, careers, freedom, sexual expression, materialism, and traveling against getting married young and having a large family. Again, the 1950s through 1960s saw some of the youngest ages of marriage among men and women in their early twenties while the status quo now for marriage is a full decade later than this. This datum is an ingredient that is partially to blame for the high demand for In-Vitro Fertilization treatments. When women forgo the best birthing years of their life, older couples turn to alternatives like assisted reproductive technologies to assist them. The results are consistent: if you get married late, you have fewer kids, if any at all.
The declining birthrate is a symptom of a deeper underlying problem. There has been a growing, concerted and coordinated effort over the years to diminish the good of children, marriage and the family, and elevate anything that will result in literally destroying and preventing progeny. Statistics on a page are one thing, but the visible indicators of the diminishing family size begin to hit home when you take them in turn. Let’s briefly ponder those indicators, consider the prime suspects behind these trends, and then chart a way forward.
The Empty Nest Redesign: How Shrinking Families Are Reshaping American Society
The Societal Squeeze Against Larger Families
Consider the fact that full-sized passenger vans that could fit twelve to fifteen people were once common and affordable for larger families. Today, most automakers don’t produce them for families but primarily for their commercial fleets. In 2014, Ford ended its full van size Econoline series it had since 1961, marking the beginning of the end of large affordable passenger vans. A warning turned joke by the late Chris Farley, was that if you didn’t graduate from high school you would “end up living in a van down by the river,” isn’t applicable anymore. This now is only true for the empty nesters, influencers, and the rise of DINK couples (Double Income, No Kids) who can afford the luxury of working remotely and the price tag of a van that once could purchase a small home. The new family vehicle is the mini-van, and the new mini-vans are smaller SUVs and compact crossovers. Similarly, car seats are designed with a more sleek, narrower profile to fit in the smaller vehicles they drive.
Smaller vehicles correspond to smaller houses to accommodate the smaller household. Many modern floor plans don’t boast a four to five bedroom home, but a smaller three bedroom home with a bonus hobby room rather than build space for children to grow in. The idea of a “starter home” used to be the ideal for young couples expecting children, but now they target child-free millennials willing to go the way of the DINKs. Where the home becomes small, so then does the furniture and baby gear, reflecting fewer children, and a lower priority of the American family. Many products on the market now display their “space saving” features, indicating people living in smaller homes with less space to grow. The trend has even been reflected in marketing and advertising to the consumer. Consider a 2005 Pampers ad that broke with the traditional depiction of family and young children and instead portrayed a single father. It was not just a small family that was seen on television, but a peek into the reality of the breakdown of the American family. Correspondingly, baby stroller manufacturers used to create double, even triple child strollers, but now this piece of the market is overwhelmingly aimed at single-child strollers.
Low birth rates and smaller families are also observed in the closing and consolidation of school districts. Entire grade levels are smaller than they were half a generation ago. Many colleges and universities are already preparing for a projected “enrollment cliff” where they will be forced to freeze all hiring at best, and, at worst, be prepared for large-scale layoffs of teachers and administrators due to less students.
Entire cultural expectations about the size of family have made a seismic shift. It was not uncommon to hear of families of eight, nine, ten or more children around World War II. Now a family of three or four is considered large, counter-cultural, and for many, unappealing. I can recall making small talk at the airport with a stranger. When he discovered I had three kids he asked, “Are you a Mormon?” As though Mormons have exclusive rights on the creation mandate “to be fruitful and multiply!” I now have five kids. This reality cascades into several other tangible experiences this generation no longer encounters. For example, consider the fact that my generation of millennials (those born from 1980–1996) grew up with video gaming systems like the Nintendo 64 with a gaming library that, of its nearly 400 games, was nearly 70% multiplayer. These games were played in-person, with other family members or friends in the same room. Today the experience is almost entirely online, virtual, disembodied, and disconnected, in part due to the fact that single child homes don’t have other siblings to play with.
Even the kids’ shows of my childhood are skewed toward adults and away from a family friendly audience. Consider the once comical Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated franchise that peaked in the 1990s; the 2014 movie adaptation could not even pass the muster of today’s parental guidelines. Content created for children today increasingly reflects creators who seem to have no children and are out of touch with what is appropriate for our youngest members of society. Is it possible that many of the content creators for children today have an active desire to shape a new generation in a different direction and tear them from the safety of their most tender years of development?
Lastly, and perhaps most pointedly and visibly felt, is the retreat of children and family-friendly spaces from restaurants. Not only have fast-food chains reduced the prominence of children’s meals and marketing due to fewer kids per household, but this younger generation doesn’t share a cultural memory of things like the Pizza Hut reading program which awarded young readers a personal pan pizza on a cast iron skillet for reading achievement. Then there was the McDonald’s PlayPlaces that are now virtually extinct, or even the vibrant colors that fast food chains once decorated themselves in, but have now downgraded and remodeled for a cold, institutionalized, millennial gray. Cracker Barrel nearly became yet another fatality in the long line of erasing family friendly décor.
On the whole, the trend is well established: families are smaller and fewer in number with less room for them to flourish. Young married couples starting out in life will face these societal, cultural pressures and more: to have fewer kids, later in life, or no kids at all.
The Societal Squeeze Against Having Any Children
The assault on families is not just against large families, it’s against children in general. Any attack on the image of God that tries to prevent a true one-flesh union or the creation of a family unit as God designed it is ultimately anti-child. Consider how the following leftward ideologies are anti-children:
Transgenderism carries the false promise of acceptance and being at home in your identity once you are in the right body. But the results are a permanent mutilating of one’s God-given body that often sterilizes and eliminates the very biological devices needed to have children.
Abortion murders the fruit of the womb and denies the image-bearing child any dignity, the parents any progeny, and the society any future.
Same-sex marriage makes the false promise of equality and trades the love that is meant for the other inward on itself and cuts off the possibility of any future offspring. Two members of the same-sex cannot have children by themselves.
Sometimes, someone is so brazen as to air their strategy out in the open, as when Lily Sanchez argues in a 2022 article with Current Affairs that “the family is a conservative project that limits human flourishing. The family must be abolished.” Sanchez’s comments are not in isolation; they point to a much larger network that is opposed to larger families and children in general.
Who is Driving the Pressure on Families and Against Children?
The enemies of Christ and the family don’t always tip their hand or let their mask slip. But when it does, we can’t forget that it has, and despite the new camouflage they acquire for themselves, it’s still the same sinister foe lurking underneath. For example, in 1969, Fredrick S. Jaffe, founder of what is today known as the Guttmacher Institute, a research Non-Government Organization that aims to expand women’s sexual and reproductive rights (which is political code for abortion), wrote a memorandum for The Population Council to review ideas for population control. Central to Jaffe’s proposal for curbing population growth was abortion on-demand. Despite the dressed-up language of abortion being “voluntary” the child in the womb never once has volunteered or consented to being murdered. The “Jaffe Memo” as it would later be called, would be fiercely defended by Planned Parenthood, of which he would later become its vice president.
Planned Parenthood’s advocacy for shaping a smaller sized American family has not been limited to the halls of Washington D.C. but has found a considerable support base; thirty-six percent of their funding comes from individual and corporate fundraising. A list of supporting business and corporations compiled by Human Life International shows Planned Parenthood raised 720 million dollars in 2022 through this means of support alone. Though no list could possibly be comprehensive, the ideology of every corporation that gives to a pro-death organization calls their own ideology into question. The known list of businesses and corporations that give to Planned Parenthood forms a complex web that touches nearly every sector of society. For example, J.P. Morgan Chase (finance/banking); Microsoft (technology); Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson (healthcare/pharmaceuticals); Macy’s and Target (retail/goods); The Walt Disney Company (entertainment/media); Nike (fashion); PepsiCo (food/beverage); Exxon Mobil and Shell (energy/utilities); United Airlines (transportation); and AutoZone (automotive companies). If the support of an anti-family organization is a priority in their business practices, what other things closer to their purview will they partake in to further shape the American landscape to make the soil for the family less fertile and welcoming?
Why get married and have kids in a world that doesn’t want them when you can have a fun in a culture that will let you live like carefree and unconstrained gods? This temptation has an echo of the first temptation in Genesis 3. But it’s a promise that can never be delivered on—and one that pales in comparison to a better way.
How Should We Then Live?
It’s important for Christians to ask, “What time is it in redemptive history?” We live before the return of Christ and the consummation of His Kingdom and therefore need not fret, because of Christ’s victory on the cross and over the grave. But we need to walk circumspectly in this world. The adversary is roaming and active seeking anyone he can devour (1 Pet. 5:8), and it would be wise for us to realize the trends and cultural forces at work to pressure the American family into non-existence. The picture that is presented before us by whatever actors join Planned Parenthood is that there isn’t room for you to start a family, let alone have a larger family. If there’s no room, it’s far easier, simpler and more fun to be an untroubled DINK. But this is a false promise created by a false cultural liturgy. In the end it not only kills society, but it often fills with regret those who forsook children for the sake of their careers. Scripture paints a more compelling picture for us.
Children and large families are gifts from the Lord (Ps. 127:3), and one way Christians can show that is by getting married, being fruitful, and multiplying. Christian couples can break the societal enchantment against children by intentionally resolving—as God enables—to have a lot of children. Churches full of crying babies, carpets stained from spilled milk, and the trashcan aromas of stinky diapers all represent a bountiful reality that is pleasing in the sight of God. The people of God get to be the first to paint the picture of what a compelling community looks like where large families can flourish as a norm. They can begin to cultivate a new generation to take back what was deleted and erased from the family-friendly spaces of yesterday.
One of the most beautiful things churches can do is not just embrace large families, but wrap their arms around multiple generations where the assembly can normalize and remove generational boundaries society likes to erect. The young churches of today will become the old churches of tomorrow unless they learn to honor those with crowns of gray hair (Prov. 16:31).
And now this comes full circle back to where this began, where the nuclear family began, and also where it ceased to have a regular, enduring presence of parents and grandparents in the home. This isn’t to suggest that Christians need to necessarily have their parents and grandparents move in with them. But overly taut boundaries that keep generations segregated from each other have done us a disservice. Thankfully, the Bible gives us the resources to combat this, and one place we can begin is in the weekly multi-generational assembly of saints. There we gather and collapse what the world has done to try to keep us apart, and we model what a compelling community looks like. There in the assembly, Christian business owners, investors, and others can be sent out to rethink the spaces that have been lost in our restaurants. Artists, writers, filmmakers can appropriately create movies and shows that elevate and dignify the family in the way God has designed it. We can rally community leaders and politicians to represent our biblical values in politics and expose the works of darkness.
Conclusion
If we can model what our society has lost with thick communities of large families in the church, we can begin to muster a charge to storm the gates of hell and against those who want to snatch our young and dishonor the elderly. It is in the assembly, the church, where we can fortify ourselves against malicious actors and cultural pressures, where we can raise up a generation of mighty men and women to live courageously for Christ. It is in the church where we can encourage and help one another to obey God’s command to be fruitful and fill the earth as we make disciples. And it is in the church where we can welcome the single, the sterile, the aged, and the cultural refugee to join us by faith in Christ as part of the family of God. We can, with the grace of God, turn back the tide of the culture of death.
