Author: unitedfamilies

To get to the nearest playground from my house, my family must cross four wide streets. Cars whizz by at 30 miles an hour, and—depending on the route—some intersections lack stop signs or marked crosswalks. Thankfully, we’ve avoided car crashes thus far, but we also live in one of the most walkable neighborhoods in our city. Other parents in our sphere have to contend with a lack of sidewalks, further distances, and faster and heavier traffic flows. It’s dispiriting to ponder kids ranging freely through the neighborhood while watching Cybertrucks and Hummer H2s pass like wrecking balls. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Earlier this month, IFS announced a new project: the Pronatalism Initiative. This initiative is based in a simple idea: we believe that falling birth rates are a big social problem. Low fertility threatens to create a society of widespread family disappointment, feed into a culture of despair, make already polarized politics even more divisive, jeopardize America’s international strategic position, slow down economic growth, render intergenerational transfers infeasible, and curtail the pace of innovation and entrepreneurship. Perhaps worst of all, falling fertility is not a product of falling family desires, but of a yawning abyss of dreams-not-realized lingering between actual birth rates and the family sizes people want.