Marriage, Kids, and the State: Can Government Help?

Alexcis Johnson '26

A solid marriage lasts until…finances do us part? 

The marriage and family planning landscape are changing, partly due to the financial costs of raising children. At a discussion hosted by the James Madison Program in early March of 2026 titledMarriage, Kids, and the State: Can Government Help?, panelists informed attendees that research from the Institute for Family Studies finds that the U.S. birth rate sits at a low 1.6 births per woman, marriage and fertility rates are linked, and the median age of marriage is increasing for those who don’t opt out altogether. Many people view marriage and raising families as core institutions of modern society. Thus, with the changing marital scene, it is critical to encourage dialogue around why marital and fertility rates are declining and prompt open discussion on how the government could support family planning, if it should at all. 

The barriers to marriage and family planning include economic constraints, particularly the rising costs of child care and of raising children. Ever since women entered the workforce, marriage shifted from being a cornerstone to a capstone life event. With individuals able to financially provide for themselves, find a companion to live with, and achieve a higher social standing allwithout marriage, incentives to get married and start a family earlier have declined. 

Women are now more particular about who they choose for a life partner, since they no longer have to marry their high school sweetheart in order to have economic stability and a housemate. Thus, one solution to the decline of marriage rates is discussions around the modern dating scene and how individuals are selecting spouses. While women used to marry for financial benefits, with more women in the workforce, it’s very plausible that marriage rates are declining because women aren’t finding men who offer them the emotional—as opposed to just financial—benefits of partnership. Interestingly, at theMarriage, Kids, and the State event, panelist Rachel Lu proposed religion—particularly Christianity—as the most viable route for helping bring together singles who desire marriage. I think this approach is rather idealistic, pitching faith—as opposed to policy and action—as the solution to a social problem, and it also leaves non-religious individuals on the fringes of romantic partnership. 

The event’s moderator also posed the question of why conservative spaces have switched tunes from arguing for the government to stay out of individual affairs to embracing new interest in government-supported family planning. The reason may lie in the breakdown of the typical marriage script, which previously led couples to marry young while the husband enters the workforce and the mother stays home to raise the kids. But with the steady erosion of this social script, government intervention may be needed to prevent the American population from aging without enough newborns to keep population growth steady.

Currently parents receive a $2200 tax credit per child, but is this enough? While the Trump Accounts program allows babies born during a certain time period to receive $1,000 in an investment account, it doesn’t offer a financial stipend to help parents weather the costs of raising a family today. There is also the argument that Social Security and Medicare are anti-natalism programs. The argument asserts that while previous generations birthed children to ensure they would be taken care of in their later years, Social Security and Medicare now offer federal support to seniors, thus de-incentivizing adults from birthing children to ensure they’re taken care of in the future. The existence of these programs suggests that the government is willing to fund the well-being of certain vulnerable societal groups. Could families raising children be classified as a group warranting federal support, given that without intervention, birth rates may decline out of financial constraints, ultimately making our society vulnerable to population decline? One such initiative that’s already flirted with government involvement in family planning was Bush’s Healthy Marriage Initiative. The basic idea was that social issues like poverty, relationship instability, and welfare dependence decreased marriage rates among lower-income Americans. Thus, the initiative supported programs aiding individuals in building stable marriages through counseling and relationship education workshops designed to address these issues. 

While the initiative held marriage between a man and woman on perhaps an unjustly higher pedestal than same-sex relationships, single-parent or multi-generational households, it was nonetheless an attempt at using federal funding to address the private, personal, and multi-faceted issue of declining marriage and fertility rates. 

But given that the initiative did not produce the results that the Bush administration was looking for—there was limited evidence that it significantly increased marriage rates or improved long-term economic outcomes—it’s worth prompting more discussion around how the government could offer financial aid to families individually who are seeking to raise children. One of the best ways to gather inspiration for what the American government could do to address a declining birth rate is to examine what other developed nations have tried as a solution. Hungary has offered mortgage forgiveness based on the number of children a couple has and Sweden has offered subsidized daycare. While these programs have not—at least not as of yet—radically increased marriage and fertility rates, they are examples of approaches the government could take to offer direct support to families, in contrast to the Healthy Marriage Initiative, which hoped stable relationships would be a byproduct of counseling and education. 

While some proposed solutions to how the government could intervene within family planning may be expected sociopolitical arguments, there are more radical lines of thinking shaping how society discusses marriage and family planning. According to the Institute for Family Studies (IFS)/YouGov survey, 25% of Gen Z and Millennials think AI could replace human romance. With the rise of ChatGPT and potential dissatisfaction with the current dating pool that decreased marriage rates allude to, it’s easy to see how young adults may have similar faith in AI romances as they do with human love stories. Trad wives—an abbreviation of “traditional wives”—is emerging as a content sector on social media platforms like Instagram and Youtube. Trad wives generally upload short video content of themselves managing their households while their husband is away at work. One theory behind the increased visibility of trad wives online is that conservatives are hoping to encourage more women to marry earlier and devote their lives to raising children, therefore increasing marriage and fertility rates. More radical solutions include encouraging men to have as many babies as possible (as promoted by Elon Musk and Nick Cannon) and creating polygenic embryos throughartificial wombs.

In short, with the decline of marriage and fertility rates, it’s critical to encourage discourse on plausible solutions to prevent the U.S. population from shrinking. While marriage vows are between two people, it’s going to take as many voices in the conversation as possible to find a perfect match solution. 

Alexcis Johnson ‘26 is a Princetonians for Free Speech Writing Fellow majoring in neuroscience. She is from Tampa, FL.