A new study surveyed more than seven thousand Americans about having children.
Liberals and conservatives gave two very different answers about becoming parents.
Nearly a fifth of one group gave a reason for staying childless that stunned researchers.
New Institute For Family Studies Report Finds Conservatives Have 28 Percent More Kids
In June 2026, the Institute for Family Studies published one of the clearest looks yet at how politics shapes American families.
Researchers surveyed more than 7,000 adults ages 18 to 54 and asked how many children they have, and how many they actually want.
Conservative adults average 1.40 children.
Liberal adults average 1.09.
That's 28 percent more children in conservative households, and the gap holds even after researchers accounted for the fact that younger adults in the survey haven't finished having kids yet.
Ask people their ideal number of children instead of their actual number, and the same pattern shows up again.
Conservatives say they want 2.71 kids on average.
Liberals say 2.16.
Institute for Family Studies researchers noted the trend lines up with earlier findings from the group, which has also flagged young liberal women as consistently far less likely than their conservative peers to have children at all.
Liberals Are Twice As Likely To Fear Bad Genes And Bad Mental Health
The numbers alone don't tell the real story here.
The real story is why liberals are opting out.
Researchers asked respondents a simple question: would you be a good parent?
Eighteen percent of liberals said they weren't sure.
Only 9 percent of conservatives said the same.
More than a third of liberals, 36 percent, called parenting "very complicated, difficult, and stressful."
Just 24 percent of conservatives agreed.
Then the numbers get darker.
Eighteen percent of liberals said they worry about passing on bad genes or hereditary conditions to a child, roughly double the rate among conservatives.
And nineteen percent of liberals said their own mental health is currently too poor to have children, nearly twice the conservative rate.
Brad Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociology professor and fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, has studied this exact divide before, and he's found conservative women are more likely to think of themselves as captains of their own fate.
Liberal women, according to Wilcox's other research, are more prone to see themselves as victims of circumstances outside their control.
That difference in mindset shows up everywhere in this new data, from fear of bad genetics to doubts about basic parental competence.
Vice President JD Vance predicted this exact divide years before the Institute for Family Studies put numbers to it.
He's accused Democrats of embracing what he called "anti-family" and "anti-child" politics, pointing to prominent left-wing leaders without kids of their own, including Kamala Harris and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as examples of the trend.
Even Conservatives Are Having Fewer Kids Than The Bible Blesses
None of this is really a story about Republicans winning and Democrats losing.
Conservatives only want 2.71 kids on average, and replacement level for the country is right around 2.1.
That's barely above water, not exactly a full quiver.
The deeper problem here is cultural, and it's eating into both sides of the aisle.
Americans are steeped in a worldview that tells them the highest good is looking inward and expressing whatever they happen to feel in the moment.
Career, travel, and personal freedom get treated as the real markers of a life well lived, and children get treated as an obstacle to all three.
That worldview runs stronger on the left, because progressive politics rarely pushes back against it, while conservative and religious belief at least gives people something to resist it with.
Add in a culture soaked in therapy language that tells people to worry endlessly about their own feelings, and you get exactly what this study found: a generation second-guessing whether they're mentally fit to raise a child at all.
Scripture takes the opposite view entirely.
"Children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward," the Bible says in Psalm 127, calling them arrows in a father's hand.
An archer doesn't stop at one or two arrows and call his quiver full.
If American conservatives really believe what they say they believe about children being a blessing, a 2.71 average isn't a finish line.
Somewhere out there is a family with room at the table for one more child who hasn't been born yet.
Sources:
- Steven Ertelt, "Study Confirms Liberals Have Fewer Kids Than Conservatives," LifeNews.com, Aug. 26, 2026.
- Institute for Family Studies, "The Ideological Fertility Divide," June 2026.
- Staff, "New poll shows liberal women the most unhappy, lonely," Fox News.
- Staff, "JD Vance says 'anti-family' Dems took 'childless cat lady' remark out of context: 'Lie of the left'," Fox News.
