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<\/source><\/picture>In a recent \u201cX\u201d post that went viral, a young woman lamented:<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n [I\u2019m] Realizing at 32 that I don\u2019t care about building a career or climbing any corporate ladder. All I want to do is make the most amount of money working the least amount of hours possible so I can spend the MAJORITY of my time with my family, living life on my own terms instead of spending 40+ years working for a boss who\u2019s paying me what he thinks is \u201cfair.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n This woman speaks for many 30-and-40-somethings who wish they\u2019d prioritized marriage and children earlier. As births in the U.S.\u00a0sink farther<\/a>\u00a0below the replacement rate, and the average age of first marriage\u00a0hovers<\/a>\u00a0near an all-time high, a growing number of people are seeing the appeal of a life centered more around family than career, success, or status.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In fact,\u00a0Gallup\u2019s Social Series survey recently found<\/a>\u00a0that desire for larger families is at a 50-year high: 45% of respondents said that three or more children is their ideal, a big change from 20 years ago, when only 33% of Americans wanted that many kids. This, however, only makes our nation\u2019s empty maternity wards and rock-bottom birth rates more puzzling. What is growing in America are not families, but the chasm between the families Americans\u00a0say\u00a0<\/em>they want and the families they are forming.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In a\u00a0Wall Street Journal\u00a0article in May,<\/a>\u00a0Janet Adamy described how the \u201cgap between women\u2019s intended number of children and their actual family size has widened considerably. \u2026 [B]y the time women born in the late 1980s were in their early 30s, they had given birth, on average, to about one child less than they planned.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Multiplied by tens of thousands, that\u2019s a lot of missing kids. This \u201cbirth dearth\u201d has become so serious and undeniable that even mainstream media outlets like\u00a0The New York Times<\/a>,\u00a0The Washington Post<\/a>, and\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/a>\u00a0have finally acknowledged it and even debated ways to reverse it. Adamy thinks that economic and social factors are to blame. Women cannot afford to have as many kids as they want and can\u2019t find mature, financially stable men with whom to have them.\u00a0<\/p>\n These factors cannot sufficiently explain the numerous ways Americans actively opt for child-free lives. For instance,\u00a0more and more households are choosing pets over children<\/a>, and\u00a0our spending on those pets increased by a whopping 30% between 2018 and 2021<\/a>. More importantly, marriage is rarer than ever, especially among lower-income Americans even though marriage\u00a0is the most reliable means of building and keeping the financial stability required<\/a>\u00a0for children.\u00a0<\/p>\n Also, the rate of vasectomies has risen\u00a0by more than a quarter in the last decade<\/a>\u00a0and are easier than ever to obtain. Planned Parenthood of Oklahoma City\u00a0recently advertised<\/a>\u00a0free vasectomies on Facebook with the slogan \u201csnip away the stress.\u201d They were fully booked in two days.\u00a0<\/p>\n And finally, if, as several writers have asked recently, our lack of fertility can be chalked up to \u201cit\u2019s the economy, stupid,\u201d how did previous generations manage far higher birth rates in much more difficult times?\u00a0<\/p>\n Louise Perry offered a better explanation than any of these in an article published earlier this year in\u00a0The Spectator. In it, she blamed<\/a>\u00a0our \u201cprogressive\u201d lifestyle:\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The key features of modernity \u2014 urbanism, affluence, secularism, the blurring of gender distinctions, and more time spent with strangers than with kin \u2014 all of these factors in combination shred fertility.\u00a0<\/p>\n In other words, we are witnessing the domination of a life-script in which children feel superfluous. The way we live, the things we value, the roles we assume, and the priorities we set have made family an afterthought.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been culturally conditioned, at nearly every turn, to put other things ahead of marriage and children. We believe that marriage and family \u201cwill just happen when it\u2019s time.\u201d But these things rarely do just happen in our culture, which is why so many find themselves like the woman in the viral video, wishing things had gone differently but painfully aware that lost time can never be reclaimed.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Mega trends like this cannot be changed overnight. Certainly, there are policy moves,\u00a0like those recently suggested<\/a>\u00a0by Brad Wilcox and David Bass of the Institute for Family Studies, that can make change easier. Ultimately, it comes down to individual choices to plan life in a way that centers, rather than marginalizes, marriage and family. That means these things can\u2019t be an afterthought, seen as a kind of \u201ccapstone\u201d that young people expect to simply fall into place when the time is right. Rather, they must be thought of as\u00a0foundational realities<\/a>\u00a0and, as such, things to pursue and around which other aspects of life should revolve.\u00a0<\/p>\n