A widening divide has emerged over the past decade between young conservatives and liberals on the value of marriage, childbearing, and family life, according to a report released Tuesday by the Institute for Family Studies.
The data shows liberals placing markedly lower emphasis on forming families — both in attitude and in practice — compared with their conservative counterparts.
The report attributed this divide in large part to how mainstream institutions in education, media, and pop culture have advanced a mindset that prioritizes an individualistic ethos focused on personal development, hedonism, and, especially, career.
Progressive skepticism towards marriage and family life is often rooted in the idea that family places undue burdens on women and that being free of family responsibilities is often held up as an important pathway to living a meaningful and happy life.
On the other hand, a family-first mindset is resurgent on right-leaning new media platforms, which views 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.
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."
Although marriage rates have gone down for both conservatives and liberals since the 1980s, the declines have been greater among liberals, for both men and women.
According to the report, pooling data from 2021, 2022, and 2024 showed 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 and young liberal women in the share ever married, at 60% and 44%, respectively. This growing marriage gap is also visible among men.
Just as conservatives are marrying at higher rates, they are also more likely to have children during young adulthood. Indeed, there is not a large decline in the share of conservatives ages 25 to 35 who are parents from the 1990s to the present.
But there is a significant drop 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 had no statistically significant change: in the 2020s, 71% report being parents. That means there is a 31-percentage-point gap between young conservative women and their liberal peers today.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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