Vice President J.D. Vance has spent years urging people in the United States to have more babies. With the announcement that he and his wife, Usha, are expecting their fourth child in July, Vance has himself assumed the mantle of boosting the U.S. population. “Let the record show you have a vice president who practices what he preaches,” he said in a speech at the 2026 March for Life rally in Washington, D.C.
Vance’s views align with pronatalism, a political movement aimed at increasing birth rates. As fertility rates plummet worldwide, that movement has become increasingly popular, with beliefs and policies spanning the political spectrum. Some countries have adopted left-leaning policies, from tax credits for new parents to paid parental leave, to encourage childbearing. Meanwhile, in right-leaning circles, adherents tend to eschew state-funded support for children and families. They instead advocate for a return to a traditional form of nuclear families, or small, isolated family units, where women raise the children and men bring home the bacon.
Yet when it comes to increasing fertility, such policies and suggestions have largely failed. That’s because people’s reasons for foregoing children in the modern era run deep, many social scientists say. In fact, some say asking how to boost fertility is the wrong question altogether. Better to look at how to support communities. Evolutionary history, they say, is a guide.
“In ancient times, the nuclear family was not the system for taking care of children,” says Philip Cohen, a sociologist and demographer at the University of Maryland in College Park. Instead, humans practiced a cooperative form of child-rearing in which caregivers beyond the mom and dad, including extended kin, older siblings and community members, played a central role in raising children.
“It takes a village to raise a child … It’s really trite, but it’s a really profound insight into human evolutionary history.”
evolutionary anthropologist Heidi Colleran
The nuclear family is a modern invention. It emerged just a few hundred years ago and slowly proliferated across the world. That shift, coupled with other demographic changes, have weakened community ties. Nowadays, family members often live far apart. Precarious housing makes it hard for people to build societies that support communal childrearing. And smaller families mean few, or no, older siblings to watch younger ones.
Yet people still need and yearn for deeply embedded systems of care, says Heidi Colleran. She’s an evolutionary anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Consider, she says, the expression that “it takes a village to raise a child. It’s really trite, but it’s a really profound insight into human evolutionary history.”
Family roots
To understand how people might have organized their family lives in the ancient past, researchers often turn to contemporary hunting and gathering communities. Unlike in industrialized societies with their typically small, nuclear families, such societies still show immense diversity in family organizational structure, says evolutionary anthropologist Karen Kramer of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
One universal trait, though, is parents’ reliance on a wide network of caregivers. “Human life history and the central dilemma of mothers — how to find enough hours in the day to support dependent offspring — is foundational to understand why cooperative relationships between mothers and children, spouses and others emerged in the human line,” Kramer wrote in the June 2021 Social Sciences.
Such cooperative child-rearing is rare across the animal kingdom, occurring in just 9 percent of bird species and 3 percent of mammalian species. These joint systems of care even set humans apart from our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees. “A chimp mother is never going to give her infant to another female,” Colleran says. Nor, she says, are “chimps going to day care.”
Cooperative childcare was especially useful when human life histories tended to favor larger families. Child mortality was high, as was the need for children to assist as laborers or caregivers for younger siblings. But as societies have shifted away from subsistence living and into market economies, smaller families have become the norm — a phenomenon referred to as the demographic transition. That transition began in the West and has slowly reverberated across the globe.
The decrease in family size probably occurred for several reasons, research by Colleran and others suggests. Increasing education, especially among women, tends to delay childbearing. More children living to adulthood means parents invest more in fewer children. Over time, those shifts help normalize having fewer or no children, Colleran wrote in 2016 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
“It’s not women who have changed. It’s the workplace that has changed.… The workplace is now not compatible with childrearing.”
demographer and evolutionary behavioral scientist Rebecca Sear
Arguably, one of the biggest shifts lies in the workplace, says demographer and evolutionary behavioral scientist Rebecca Sear of Brunel University of London. In the past, women could both work and care for children, such as by wearing their babies in slings while working in the field or turning to their wider network of caregivers.
Women in hunting and gathering societies remain incredibly productive, Sear noted in a June 2021 review in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Researchers working in such communities have measured women’s food production. On average, that work shows, women procure almost half of the calories consumed in their communities.
Work and family life began to diverge as people shifted from farming to industry, though — a trend that accelerated with the Industrial Revolution. Lacking a network of caregivers, women tended to stay home to watch the children while men went to work.
“It’s not women who have changed. It’s the workplace that has changed.… The workplace is now not compatible with childrearing,” Sear says.
Reproductive politics
Today, total fertility rates around the world — or the average number of births per woman of childbearing age — have fallen from 5.3 births per woman in 1963 to 2.2 births per woman in 2023. Many countries, including the United States, are now below a replacement level of about two births per woman. These declines feature heavily in pronatalists’ rallying cry.
Yet many social scientists say that the fertility crisis is overblown. If the goal is simply to build the population of a given country, then, for the time being at least, immigration from higher fertility countries to lower fertility ones could fill the gap, Sear says. “Migration is the solution to low fertility.”
Yet pronatalism has long been bound up in discussions around who should have children. And contemporary pronatalism traces its roots to the eugenics movement of a century ago, Cohen says.
Many men perished in World War I, and birth rates plummeted in the aftermath. Both Franco Mussolini of Italy and Adolf Hitler of Germany established pronatalist policies.
For instance, in Nazi Germany, the government provided couples with loans to buy a house. For every child the couple had, the government would forgive a portion of that loan.
Crucially, though, such offers were not available to people with “impure” lineages, such as those with nonwhite or disabled ancestors.
In some ways, the push today feels similar, Cohen says. Pronatalist leaders often encourage more people to have children while simultaneously eschewing immigration. What’s largely missing from the dialog is how immigrants, who account for nearly a quarter of all births in the United States, also make up roughly a fifth of the childcare workforce, compensating in some ways for America’s lost villages.
A matter of framing
At heart, the debate over how to address declining birth rates hinges on how one frames the problem, or if they see it as a problem at all.
Consider, for instance, research into the effectiveness of family policies, such as paid parental leave and childcare support. Such policies may increase fertility by a tiny bit, by roughly one child for every 10 to 20 women, researchers estimated in March 2025 in Population and Development Review. Does that mean that such policies are a failure, though?
The paper’s authors argue no, saying that instead of measuring success in terms of fertility, policy makers should focus on how well such policies support individuals and families. They point to Nordic countries, which often top the world happiness rankings, as exemplars of this mindset. These countries’ policies, including making caregiving, education, housing and health care affordable for all, are not centered on convincing people to have more children, but on improving the population’s overall well-being.
Rising levels of loneliness and social isolation indicate that people crave a return to the villages of yesterday, say Cohen and others. And for some, policies that foster belonging and stability could encourage procreation. In the United States, for instance, people want more children than they are having, researchers reported in January 2023 in Population and Development Review.
So let’s help aspiring parents have children, while improving quality of life across the board, says Cohen, who was not involved with that work. Pronatalists often treat population decline as a harbinger of societal collapse, he says. But for the foreseeable future, at least, societies can adapt to fewer births through various measures, such as easing paths for immigration. “The low birth rate gives us the opportunity to fix our other problems,” he says.
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