The Left Brainwashed Young Women To Reject A Husband And Family

The American left has a “family problem” in which an increasing number of liberal young adults, particularly women, are not interested in getting married and having children.

According to a new report from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), liberal young women are not only less likely to be interested in getting married and having children, but also growing increasingly left-wing, which perpetuates their anti-family tendencies.

“The United States is witnessing a ‘closing of the American heart’ where fewer young men and women are getting married and having children, but this decline is especially precipitous for those on the Left,” report co-author Brad Wilcox, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and Senior Fellow at IFS, said. “This ideological divide in family formation is important for two reasons: liberal young adults are happier when they are married with children, and we’re seeing Blue states lose ground, family-wise, to Red states in the number of kids who will lead a progressive future.”

The report shows that the percentage of conservative and liberal women between the age of 25 and 35 who have ever been married has dropped precipitously since the 1980s. While conservative women fell from 83 percent to 60 percent, liberal women dropped from 75 percent to 44 percent.

The percentage of liberal women in the same age range who had ever has children dropped from 60 percent to 40 percent since the 1980s, while conservative women actually achieved an uptick, from 65 percent to 71 percent.

The results are driven in large part by anti-family content from the left.

Anti-Family Corporate Media Propaganda

“Progressive messaging that devalues, denies, and deconstructs the value of family life and celebrates solo living in recent years is leaving its mark on the hearts, minds, and lives of young liberals,” the study states.

That kind of messaging includes propaganda from various corporate media outlets, like a piece in the New York Times arguing “married heterosexual motherhood in America … is a game no one wins.” The Washington Post ran an op-ed called “Divorce led me to my happily ever after,” and Bloomberg insists that having no family will make women more wealthy with its headline “Women who Stay Single and Don’t Have Kids are Getting Richer.” Psychology Today, meanwhile, ran a psy-op on young women claiming that staying single and childless will make them happier.

In reality, women are much happier married and with children. It does not take a study for any honest observer to witness the anger and despair of single, childless women. They sort of wear it on their sleeves (and post their rants online). But studies exist, too.

Just take a look at Tennessee state Rep. Aftyn Behn, the Democrat running for U.S. Congress to represent Nashville, who has condemned women who get married and have children as taking part in “deeply patriarchal structures.”

“My therapist always asks me to transcribe my dreams, and the recurring dream I’ve had is standing up in a cafeteria full of women and saying ‘I don’t want children. I want power!’” she said.

Apparently it’s generational for her family, since her mother made a point to tell her to never have children, too.

“If you’re skeptical of the idea that the Left has taken an anti-family turn in recent years, just listen in on Aftyn Behn (D-TN),” Wilcox stated in response to Behn. “Her (admittedly extreme) comments help explain why family formation is falling much more precipitously among liberal young women.”

‘Midas Mindset‘

Behn emphasized work, money, power, and a fear of sacrifice as her reasoning, much of which fits in with what the IFS report calls the “Midas Mindset” where “work is viewed as the source and summit of a meaningful and happy life. Focusing on love, marriage, and starting a family, by contrast, does not merit nearly the same devotion.”

A poll cited by the report showed that the Gen. Z women who cast a ballot for former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election ranked getting married and having children “dead last” on a list of priorities, in favor of “Having a job or career you find fulfilling” and “Having enough money to do the things you want to do.”

The “Midas Mindset” is exacerbated by women being told that family “places undue burdens on women” and that avoiding family altogether opens “avenues that are as satisfying or more satisfying or lead to a happier, more fulfilled life,” according to one New York Times writer.

That sits in stark contrast to conservatives who have a “family-first” mindset. That mindset was often espoused by the late Charlie Kirk, who warned against “careerism and consumerism” and stated that “Having children is more important than having a good career.”

IFS points to numerous other commentators and media messaging on the right that is advancing that same idea, which is “building a family-first ‘plausibility structure‘ that now competes with the Left’s less-than-family-friendly messaging in the mainstream media.”

Contrasting heavily with their female counterparts, Gen. Z men who voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 said their number one priority was parenthood, and number four was marriage.

The major disagreement on priorities among Generation Z women and men tracks substantially with the fact that Gen. Z men are moving to the ideological right while the women are moving to the ideological left. This makes it even more difficult for them to find a suitable mate who shares in values, goals, and other foundational elements to successful relationships.

“Because ideological leaders on the Left and Right have been pushing divergent conceptions of the good life, vis-à-vis family, we predict that the ideological divide in marriage and childbearing among young men and women is growing, especially in the last decade or so,” the report states.

The Left-Right Marriage Divide

Young conservatives have been more likely to get married than liberals since the 1980s, but the marriage rate was similar, with conservatives tending to get married earlier. Among adults between ages 25 and 35, 74 percent of conservative men and 83 percent of conservative women were married in the 1980s. The marriage gap with liberals was a little over ten percentage points.

Now, there is a 16-percentage-point difference between young conservative women versus liberal women who have ever been married, while there is a 22-percentage-point difference between liberal and conservative men.

Of that age demographic, conservative men were the only ones to trend upward in marriage at any point since the 1980s, moving from 52 percent in the 2010s to 57 percent in the 2020s.

In line with higher marriage rates among conservatives, the rate of conservatives having children has remained similar since the 1990s. However, liberal men in the 1980s with children were at about 47 percent, compared to today’s 22 percent, while liberal women decreased from 60 percent to 40 percent now.

Ideological Sorting And The Politics Of Family

“The growing marriage and parent divide may be partly due to ideological polarization among America’s youth,” the IFS report states. “As both ends of the spectrum take up more partisan views on marriage and children, we may witness sorting along these lines, with marriage-minded adults moving Right and less-familistic adults moving Left.”

Women, in particular, highlight the polarization problem, as 28 percent of women between 25 and 35 years of age in the 1980s identified as conservative, while 31 percent identified as liberal. A relatively even split between the two ideological groups remained through the 2000s, but by the 2010s, women started leaning heavier left.

Liberal women in that age group made up 32 percent, while conservates made up 25 percent. By the 2020s, 36 percent of young women identified as liberal, while 22 percent identified as conservative.

That “shrinking minority” of conservative women could be a “devoted core who are especially family minded,” propping up marriage and birth rates among conservative women, the report states.

Men, meanwhile, have not swung dramatically in one ideological direction or the other.

The contrast drives liberal mindset favoring an “individualistic ethos focused on personal development, hedonism, and, especially, career,” while the conservative mindset views “getting married and having children as the best ways to forge a meaningful and happy life, and to avoid the plagues of loneliness, anxiety, and depression sweeping young adulthood in America.”

Wilcox noted that liberals do not seem to grasp that their seemingly defiant individualism is actually fueling anxiety, depression, and loneliness, and that if they were to get married and have children, they could be just as happy, statistically, as conservatives are.

By having fewer children, the left will lose political power and the ability to shape the future of society with their preferences.

“We are witnessing the real-world consequences of an ideological divide where the Right prioritizes marriage and childbearing and the Left discounts them in fertility and population shifts across America,” the report states.

While there is a general decline in the birth rate in America, liberals are driving it much more than conservatives, as fertility is higher in red sates and lower in blue states.

Among the 10 states with the highest margin of victory for Trump, there has been an 11 percent decline in aggregate birth rate since 2001. Among the 10 states with the highest margin of victory for Harris, there has been a 25 percent decline over the same period.

That’s no reason for Republican-run states to celebrate — it is still in the negative — but it is more than twice as bad in Democrat-run states.

Impending Massive Demographic Change

The report did not spend much time on massive demographic change as a result of this birth rate issue other than to point out that it will happen respective to the red and blue states.

“By delaying and foregoing family formation, the Left seems poised to lose ground in American life,” the report states. “This should worry liberals.”

It should worry all Americans.

Even though it might be rhetorically affirming for conservatives to think that it’s probably a good thing that all these far-left people aren’t raising far-left children, or, good, the problem solves itself, the reality is that the left’s refusal to participate in increasing and padding the birth rate is making the importation of even more foreigners to compete in the labor market — and take over American culture and communities — inevitable.

Throughout history, importation of foreign labor to make up for falling birth rates and keep up with production demand has been the death knell of countries (see America and Japan).

It almost always means bringing in people who do not share the values or culture of the country they are going to enter, and despite the fact that conservatives might not have much politically in common with someone on the far left, the very fact that someone on the far left is a product of American culture makes them much more favorable a countryman than someone from the third world.

After all, “the costs of the Left’s devaluation of family are not just psychic. They are also social, political, and civilizational,” the report noted.

Breccan F. Thies is the White House correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.