Why Americans may be delaying pregnancy, despite long-term goals to have kids

Guzzo et al. noted that US birth rates are at historic lows, even though Americans say they want children. To better understand the reasons for this contradiction, the authors analyzed responses from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (TARS): Wave 6, 2018-2020, available from NACJD. TARS is a longitudinal dataset that first interviewed middle schoolers and high schoolers in 2001, with eight follow-up waves since then. For this paper, Guzzo et al.’s analytic sample was made up of the Wave 6 respondents, at a mean age of 32, who had reported their fertility expectations. Participants with greater economic pessimism found it more important to avoid a pregnancy in the short term, as did those who expressed greater concern about having a good relationship in the future. These subjective concerns mattered even when Guzzo et al. controlled for objective factors like income, employment, homeownership, and actual relationship status. So, contemporary fertility decline may be due to people’s short-term decisions to postpone pregnancy, in part due to having more subjective concerns about it at a given point in time, and not due to a rejection of parenthood forever.

September 11, 2025