These are good ideas. It seems very hard to undo the two-income trap because it’s a collective action problem, and because the culture expects mothers to work.
I’ve seen countless posts on Reddit relationships where a man complains that the mother of his young children “won’t get a job.”
A lot of men expect their partners to work — or if they’re willing to support a SAHM, they become resentful and start to expect more control because “I pay for everything.”
Many of us grew up watching our mothers get treated as subordinate because they were dependent on our fathers’ income. I knew I’d never put myself in that position even if a spouse agreed to “let me” stay home.
I actually love the idea of tying parenthood to Social Security benefits. It recognizes something we usually ignore: raising children isn’t just a personal choice, it’s labor that sustains the entire system.
At the same time, I don’t think everyone should have children. A child deserves to be loved, wanted, and cherished. That starts with being brought into a home where they are genuinely desired, not into a situation where they exist as a financial strategy or a means to secure benefits.
Children can be deeply fulfilling for those who want them. But for someone who doesn’t, it can feel like a life sentence. That’s not fair to the parent, and it’s certainly not fair to the child.
So I think the purpose of these kinds of interventions should be very clear: not to incentivize parenthood indiscriminately, but to enable it for those who already desire it and are holding back because of structural risks.
Make it easier, safer, and more rational for people who want children to have them. Not to push people into it who don’t.
Might we accommodate babies in the workplace? It would preserve income and perhaps career progression for the mother. It would help with the infant care problem.
And it would give the other women in the office a case of the baby rabies.
It's an interesting question: At what dollar amount do benefits for mothers push people who don't want kids into having them? The child tax deduction we have now clearly hasn't reached that level. Here in Michigan, the RxKids program is doing UBI for pregnant women and the first 6 months after each baby is born. It has mostly been adopted by cities with poor populations and a higher fertility rate.
The child tax deduction right now is for sure not an incentive. It is scary to think someone taking on everything parenthood requires for a few thousand dollars.
Sarah. these are all sound ideas and concepts but the workplace is also incredibly ageist. If young women have a kid or several, they're finishing say graduate school and or entering the work force around 30?? they'll be discriminated agains.t
I agree, which is why I propose monetary benefits to companies for the first few years of employment. Beyond ageism (which you are right about), it really is a risk to hire someone who has been out of practice for years.
Providing SS benefits to stay at home parents has been a progressive proposal for decades, and has been in several DNC platforms. It's also incredibly popular among the public. But Republicans kill every chance at legislation. And the Fertility Bros never talk about it because their goal is not to increase fertility but to make women dependent on men. They are more willing to take mothers' education away than expand their opportunities.
Yes. I first wrote (by hand, pre-email in the home!) to my representatives advocating for social security credits for caretakers over 30 years ago. And it was not a new idea then.
Yes it's bizarre that Sarah doesn't seem to be aware of caregiver credits, although I suppose she's not alone in this. The left hasn't done a good enough job in making this proposal better known.
It’s not bizarre at all. It’s by design. This county runs on the unpaid, or grossly underpaid, labor of women.
First with childcare. Then later with elder care.
Who benefits from each woman having to reinvent the wheel? Not women.
We are so brainwashed as a society that when someone says to a white collar woman , “Can you consider that your career is not the feminist win you want it to be when factoring in the underpaid (usually grossly underpaid) women’s work that made it possible?”, the first reaction is “You must want me to quit my job and raise children for free!”
What I really want is for white collar, working women to fight as hard for the wages and benefits of the women who make their careers possible as they do for themselves.
But I guess accusing me of wanting them to quit their jobs is a lot more comfortable.
When advocating for a living wage and benefits for carers (90+% are women) receives that reaction (& it is far and away the most common one), well, someone is benefiting from that.
Sarah, this is one of the sharpest, most unflinching pieces I’ve read on the fertility crisis. You rightly diagnose the problem as cultural and economic rather than merely a matter of “more subsidies,” and your concrete proposals—especially the targeted support for women re-entering the workforce after childbirth—strike exactly the right note. They address the opportunity costs that actually matter to high-achieving women without falling into the usual pro-natalist trap of treating all births as equally desirable.
Personally, as a liberal eugenicist, I’ve never been enthusiastic about the classic child-benefit model precisely because it functions as a fertility subsidy weighted toward the working classes. We already have ample data showing that such policies tend to increase completed fertility most among lower-education cohorts while doing little for the cognitive and professional elites whose children will disproportionately shape the next generation’s human capital. Societies serious about long-term flourishing should be far more deliberate about channeling resources toward enabling elite women—those with the highest educational attainment and genetic potential—to have children earlier and in greater numbers, rather than defaulting to across-the-board pronatalism that simply amplifies existing dysgenic patterns.
I also think your social-security reform proposal, while directionally correct, doesn’t go far enough. A pay-as-you-go pension system is mathematically viable only under conditions of stable or growing population. The spectacle of childless middle-class professionals drawing full Medicare and pension benefits is not just unfair; it is structurally parasitic. My view is more stringent: individuals who reach retirement without having had at least two children should forfeit all public pension and Medicare entitlements. Conversely, those with more than two children—especially those who had them during their prime reproductive years—should receive actuarially enhanced benefits. Fertility is the ultimate contribution to the intergenerational social contract; we should stop pretending otherwise.
Thank you! One of the reasons your route (and even mine, actually) re: social security could not pass is that hardly ANYONE is aware of how it is funded. They think they are “getting back” what they put in.
To be fair, it is no different from any other sort of financial savings in this regard. Somebody must buy into the stock or bond market tomorrow for you to make money cashing out of it. Even cash in a jar or Bitcoin or bars of gold has a value premised on the idea that future workers will want to earn that from you.
This is kind of the point that I think you're getting at here, but that people calling social security a ponzi scheme in other contexts are often missing. You are unavoidably dependent on the future economy. There is no financial trick that means we can collectively save up doctor's appointments and other services today to consume in the future as retirees; that's why we have to invest in the next generation.
The caveat to this is, if AI really is going to put most of us out of work, then maybe we can retire with low fertility for a few generations.
"My view is more stringent: individuals who reach retirement without having had at least two children should forfeit all public pension and Medicare entitlements."
This proposal punishes people who were unable to have children through infertility or failure to find a partner in reproductive years, besides those who do not want children. Not every human being will be a parent: there are other ways of contributing to society and living life.
If you adopt kids and raise each of them for ten plus years, you're good to go. I don't care about other contributions, social security isn't sustainable if you're not pumping out kids.
I've often thought of this issue. Especially now that my kids are of reproductive age. If I were king.....
Pay mom's a decent salary until kids are high school age. Like six figures.
The way we thought about it was,,, "what is our purpose, what is the most important thing we are doing" It wasn't money, or jobs, it was our kids. Moms are far and away the best moms, all dads can really do is help, work like a dog to support one's wife and kids, that's why dads are here.
What an incredibly insulting thing to say to dads. My husband is a full-on, equal parent to our three kids, not just a "helper." Yes he didn't have to carry the pregnancies or breastfeed, but he does literally everything else. Maybe one way we could encourage fertility is to dismantle this myth -- perpetuated in Sarah's post and elsewhere -- that the burdens of child-rearing fall on the mother alone and that fathers are genetically hardwired to neglect their kids. Perhaps instead of encouraging mothers to quit their jobs, we can encourage a more equal distribution of domestic labor. I understand that is an unpopular proposition, however, because it goes against the biological determinism to which most people in this conversation are committed.
Idk man my dad was the primary parent, and the one who gave up the career. My mom had breastfeeding issues either way so there wasn’t a real advantage to which person stayed home. I like that these policies are gender neutral. If we want women physicians and lawyers etc., then policies need to exist for men to attain status by being good parents as well
“…all dads can really do is help, work like a dog to support one's wife and kids, that's why dads are here.”
What in the hell are you talking about? Help? “Help” with your own child? Sir, I’m embarrassed for you.
I’m old enough to have an adult child myself. That means it was over 50 years ago that my father and mother worked full time on opposite shifts while the other parent cared for us kids.
I agree fully with your diagnosis of the problem, albeit not your solutions. But I want to take issue with a key part of your framing, which is that parenthood isn’t “rational.” To say this takes for granted that valuing material abundance, free time, and professional status is more rational than procreation. The evolutionary perspective would certainly challenge the idea that anything can be more rational than that.
Sarah - all very sensible, thoughtful and actionable suggestions. However, i fear this will all be redundant (as most of us will be) with AI, automation, robotics and subsequent expected widespread job losses. The problem may self correct - less jobs = more babies because most important thing ANYONE can do will be to raise children.
Excellent piece, Sarah. As a father to our five-week-old firstborn, I agree about the invaluable role my wife plays. We’ve decided against daycare for at least the first three years. Watching the attachment between my wife and son is an experience so pure and beautiful—dare I say, innate?—that I doubt it exists elsewhere.
One thing I like about these suggestions is it integrates what Twenge describes as a "slow life strategy." Boomers often mention how they had a job, wife, kids, and property at 21. The world has not been like that for generations and I don't see why it would return to that. A challenge for that shift is the reality of fertility requires a "faster" life strategy and we're culturally resistant to that. Some argue a 24 year old can't be trusted to make decisions about their partner or family plans.
Which is the challenge for these otherwise great ideas. I like any proposal that begins with "Like the GI Bill, but for..." but I don't imagine any idea will overcome the performed offense that comes up when people are forced to acknowledge fertility exists. Any suggestion young women should be associated with the act of sex (even if indirectly through motherhood) is portrayed as perverted. I feel like the culture needs to close the argument on "at what age are you an adult?" Apparently it's not 18 — and more and more may not be 21 either.
I don't know how Poland operates but it sounds like you're describing the Earned Income Tax Credit, which the US has had for decades now. Whether the policy is good or bad, it has not stemmed the fertility cliff.
People are overall better if life is less affected and influenced by the government, not more. Therefore make all new confiscation of citizens' money less associated with personal income and taxing sweat and more associated with personal spending. Phase out Medicare taxes on making a living and incentivise personal retirement savings. A financially conservative family will benefit more from being able to keep what they earn than how it's set up today to penalize earnings. The government won't let people keep their own fruits of their own labor. It's perverse.
Some interesting ideas here! For me the most obvious solution is the one I experienced after having each of my three kids here in Germany: a year of paid maternity leave (at 67% of your former salary) followed by affordable day care. You get the best of both worlds: staying home with kids while they're young AND getting back into the workforce when they're a bit older. Good part-time jobs are also key to making this work. Now I know someone will say Germany's birth rate is also declining, and that's true. But is the goal to increase the birth rate, or is the goal to make mothers' and children's lives better?
These are good ideas. It seems very hard to undo the two-income trap because it’s a collective action problem, and because the culture expects mothers to work.
I’ve seen countless posts on Reddit relationships where a man complains that the mother of his young children “won’t get a job.”
A lot of men expect their partners to work — or if they’re willing to support a SAHM, they become resentful and start to expect more control because “I pay for everything.”
Many of us grew up watching our mothers get treated as subordinate because they were dependent on our fathers’ income. I knew I’d never put myself in that position even if a spouse agreed to “let me” stay home.
I actually love the idea of tying parenthood to Social Security benefits. It recognizes something we usually ignore: raising children isn’t just a personal choice, it’s labor that sustains the entire system.
At the same time, I don’t think everyone should have children. A child deserves to be loved, wanted, and cherished. That starts with being brought into a home where they are genuinely desired, not into a situation where they exist as a financial strategy or a means to secure benefits.
Children can be deeply fulfilling for those who want them. But for someone who doesn’t, it can feel like a life sentence. That’s not fair to the parent, and it’s certainly not fair to the child.
So I think the purpose of these kinds of interventions should be very clear: not to incentivize parenthood indiscriminately, but to enable it for those who already desire it and are holding back because of structural risks.
Make it easier, safer, and more rational for people who want children to have them. Not to push people into it who don’t.
Really well written piece.
Might we accommodate babies in the workplace? It would preserve income and perhaps career progression for the mother. It would help with the infant care problem.
And it would give the other women in the office a case of the baby rabies.
It's an interesting question: At what dollar amount do benefits for mothers push people who don't want kids into having them? The child tax deduction we have now clearly hasn't reached that level. Here in Michigan, the RxKids program is doing UBI for pregnant women and the first 6 months after each baby is born. It has mostly been adopted by cities with poor populations and a higher fertility rate.
The child tax deduction right now is for sure not an incentive. It is scary to think someone taking on everything parenthood requires for a few thousand dollars.
Sarah. these are all sound ideas and concepts but the workplace is also incredibly ageist. If young women have a kid or several, they're finishing say graduate school and or entering the work force around 30?? they'll be discriminated agains.t
I agree, which is why I propose monetary benefits to companies for the first few years of employment. Beyond ageism (which you are right about), it really is a risk to hire someone who has been out of practice for years.
Providing SS benefits to stay at home parents has been a progressive proposal for decades, and has been in several DNC platforms. It's also incredibly popular among the public. But Republicans kill every chance at legislation. And the Fertility Bros never talk about it because their goal is not to increase fertility but to make women dependent on men. They are more willing to take mothers' education away than expand their opportunities.
Yes. I first wrote (by hand, pre-email in the home!) to my representatives advocating for social security credits for caretakers over 30 years ago. And it was not a new idea then.
Yes it's bizarre that Sarah doesn't seem to be aware of caregiver credits, although I suppose she's not alone in this. The left hasn't done a good enough job in making this proposal better known.
It’s not bizarre at all. It’s by design. This county runs on the unpaid, or grossly underpaid, labor of women.
First with childcare. Then later with elder care.
Who benefits from each woman having to reinvent the wheel? Not women.
We are so brainwashed as a society that when someone says to a white collar woman , “Can you consider that your career is not the feminist win you want it to be when factoring in the underpaid (usually grossly underpaid) women’s work that made it possible?”, the first reaction is “You must want me to quit my job and raise children for free!”
What I really want is for white collar, working women to fight as hard for the wages and benefits of the women who make their careers possible as they do for themselves.
But I guess accusing me of wanting them to quit their jobs is a lot more comfortable.
When advocating for a living wage and benefits for carers (90+% are women) receives that reaction (& it is far and away the most common one), well, someone is benefiting from that.
And it’s not women.
The best argument I have ever seen for supporting Motherhood and rational gender differences. Congratulations
Sarah, this is one of the sharpest, most unflinching pieces I’ve read on the fertility crisis. You rightly diagnose the problem as cultural and economic rather than merely a matter of “more subsidies,” and your concrete proposals—especially the targeted support for women re-entering the workforce after childbirth—strike exactly the right note. They address the opportunity costs that actually matter to high-achieving women without falling into the usual pro-natalist trap of treating all births as equally desirable.
Personally, as a liberal eugenicist, I’ve never been enthusiastic about the classic child-benefit model precisely because it functions as a fertility subsidy weighted toward the working classes. We already have ample data showing that such policies tend to increase completed fertility most among lower-education cohorts while doing little for the cognitive and professional elites whose children will disproportionately shape the next generation’s human capital. Societies serious about long-term flourishing should be far more deliberate about channeling resources toward enabling elite women—those with the highest educational attainment and genetic potential—to have children earlier and in greater numbers, rather than defaulting to across-the-board pronatalism that simply amplifies existing dysgenic patterns.
I also think your social-security reform proposal, while directionally correct, doesn’t go far enough. A pay-as-you-go pension system is mathematically viable only under conditions of stable or growing population. The spectacle of childless middle-class professionals drawing full Medicare and pension benefits is not just unfair; it is structurally parasitic. My view is more stringent: individuals who reach retirement without having had at least two children should forfeit all public pension and Medicare entitlements. Conversely, those with more than two children—especially those who had them during their prime reproductive years—should receive actuarially enhanced benefits. Fertility is the ultimate contribution to the intergenerational social contract; we should stop pretending otherwise.
Thank you! One of the reasons your route (and even mine, actually) re: social security could not pass is that hardly ANYONE is aware of how it is funded. They think they are “getting back” what they put in.
To be fair, it is no different from any other sort of financial savings in this regard. Somebody must buy into the stock or bond market tomorrow for you to make money cashing out of it. Even cash in a jar or Bitcoin or bars of gold has a value premised on the idea that future workers will want to earn that from you.
This is kind of the point that I think you're getting at here, but that people calling social security a ponzi scheme in other contexts are often missing. You are unavoidably dependent on the future economy. There is no financial trick that means we can collectively save up doctor's appointments and other services today to consume in the future as retirees; that's why we have to invest in the next generation.
The caveat to this is, if AI really is going to put most of us out of work, then maybe we can retire with low fertility for a few generations.
They actually do know how it works and choose not to think about it. Everyone refers freedom without responsibility.
"My view is more stringent: individuals who reach retirement without having had at least two children should forfeit all public pension and Medicare entitlements."
This proposal punishes people who were unable to have children through infertility or failure to find a partner in reproductive years, besides those who do not want children. Not every human being will be a parent: there are other ways of contributing to society and living life.
If you adopt kids and raise each of them for ten plus years, you're good to go. I don't care about other contributions, social security isn't sustainable if you're not pumping out kids.
I've often thought of this issue. Especially now that my kids are of reproductive age. If I were king.....
Pay mom's a decent salary until kids are high school age. Like six figures.
The way we thought about it was,,, "what is our purpose, what is the most important thing we are doing" It wasn't money, or jobs, it was our kids. Moms are far and away the best moms, all dads can really do is help, work like a dog to support one's wife and kids, that's why dads are here.
I only wish we'd of had 2 more.
What an incredibly insulting thing to say to dads. My husband is a full-on, equal parent to our three kids, not just a "helper." Yes he didn't have to carry the pregnancies or breastfeed, but he does literally everything else. Maybe one way we could encourage fertility is to dismantle this myth -- perpetuated in Sarah's post and elsewhere -- that the burdens of child-rearing fall on the mother alone and that fathers are genetically hardwired to neglect their kids. Perhaps instead of encouraging mothers to quit their jobs, we can encourage a more equal distribution of domestic labor. I understand that is an unpopular proposition, however, because it goes against the biological determinism to which most people in this conversation are committed.
absofuckinglutely.
Idk man my dad was the primary parent, and the one who gave up the career. My mom had breastfeeding issues either way so there wasn’t a real advantage to which person stayed home. I like that these policies are gender neutral. If we want women physicians and lawyers etc., then policies need to exist for men to attain status by being good parents as well
“…all dads can really do is help, work like a dog to support one's wife and kids, that's why dads are here.”
What in the hell are you talking about? Help? “Help” with your own child? Sir, I’m embarrassed for you.
I’m old enough to have an adult child myself. That means it was over 50 years ago that my father and mother worked full time on opposite shifts while the other parent cared for us kids.
I agree fully with your diagnosis of the problem, albeit not your solutions. But I want to take issue with a key part of your framing, which is that parenthood isn’t “rational.” To say this takes for granted that valuing material abundance, free time, and professional status is more rational than procreation. The evolutionary perspective would certainly challenge the idea that anything can be more rational than that.
Great to see you writing again Sarah. Lots to think about here.
Please don't keep us waiting so long for your next missive.
Sarah - all very sensible, thoughtful and actionable suggestions. However, i fear this will all be redundant (as most of us will be) with AI, automation, robotics and subsequent expected widespread job losses. The problem may self correct - less jobs = more babies because most important thing ANYONE can do will be to raise children.
Excellent piece, Sarah. As a father to our five-week-old firstborn, I agree about the invaluable role my wife plays. We’ve decided against daycare for at least the first three years. Watching the attachment between my wife and son is an experience so pure and beautiful—dare I say, innate?—that I doubt it exists elsewhere.
One thing I like about these suggestions is it integrates what Twenge describes as a "slow life strategy." Boomers often mention how they had a job, wife, kids, and property at 21. The world has not been like that for generations and I don't see why it would return to that. A challenge for that shift is the reality of fertility requires a "faster" life strategy and we're culturally resistant to that. Some argue a 24 year old can't be trusted to make decisions about their partner or family plans.
Which is the challenge for these otherwise great ideas. I like any proposal that begins with "Like the GI Bill, but for..." but I don't imagine any idea will overcome the performed offense that comes up when people are forced to acknowledge fertility exists. Any suggestion young women should be associated with the act of sex (even if indirectly through motherhood) is portrayed as perverted. I feel like the culture needs to close the argument on "at what age are you an adult?" Apparently it's not 18 — and more and more may not be 21 either.
I did not agree with the first part of the essay. However, your suggestions to offset the time women lose on Motherhood is brilliant.
Would love to see it implemented.
Poland did something similar. There is a tax write off for all women who have more than 3 kids (or 4).
Population decline would eventually, hopefully, push countries to think more ways in which they can encourage motherhood.
I don't know how Poland operates but it sounds like you're describing the Earned Income Tax Credit, which the US has had for decades now. Whether the policy is good or bad, it has not stemmed the fertility cliff.
People are overall better if life is less affected and influenced by the government, not more. Therefore make all new confiscation of citizens' money less associated with personal income and taxing sweat and more associated with personal spending. Phase out Medicare taxes on making a living and incentivise personal retirement savings. A financially conservative family will benefit more from being able to keep what they earn than how it's set up today to penalize earnings. The government won't let people keep their own fruits of their own labor. It's perverse.
...comment I made mentions Medicare but I meant social security.
Some interesting ideas here! For me the most obvious solution is the one I experienced after having each of my three kids here in Germany: a year of paid maternity leave (at 67% of your former salary) followed by affordable day care. You get the best of both worlds: staying home with kids while they're young AND getting back into the workforce when they're a bit older. Good part-time jobs are also key to making this work. Now I know someone will say Germany's birth rate is also declining, and that's true. But is the goal to increase the birth rate, or is the goal to make mothers' and children's lives better?
Not my experience but there is a huge variety with motherhood. and there are never any guarantees