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In 1775, a Harvard professor named Edward Wigglesworth sat down and did some math. The American colonies were doubling in population every 20 years, primarily due to a high birth rate. Projecting forward, he calculated that by the year 2000, America would have a population of 1.28 billion people. He wrote the number in capital letters, as he was so overwhelmed by the thought.

When the year 2000 arrived, we came in about a billion short.

A new report from the Institute for Family Studies, “The Demographic Dead End,” opens with Wigglesworth’s forecast and then explains, in careful and sometimes alarming detail, why it failed and what comes next. The authors, demographer Lyman Stone and researcher Peter Foreshaw Brookes, have built what they call the most reliable published reconstruction of historic American fertility: birth rates for every state back to 1917, and for Massachusetts back to 1660. The report was released to mark the country’s 250th birthday.

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The headline finding is simple. The American birthrate has fallen below 1.6 children per woman. Replacement fertility requires about 2.1. The United States is now in its third extended period of below-replacement fertility, after the Great Depression years and a stretch from 1972 to 1989. The current period, though, has lasted longer and fallen lower than either of the previous two. If the trend continues, Stone and Brookes project that the American population will peak around 351 million in the 2050s and then decline.

Why? Here the authors have uncovered something genuinely novel: evidence that the fertility collapse is not only economic, but social. Americans are not having fewer children because they want fewer children. They are having fewer children, in part, because friendship has thinned and social support for family life has weakened.

Surveys show that Americans want more children than they are likely to have. The IFS report puts desired family size at about 2.4 children on average; a 2025 Gallup survey found an even higher ideal family size of 2.7 children. Americans are actually on track for fewer than 1.6. The gap between desired and actual family size is the widest it has been since the early 1970s.

So what is blocking people? The standard answers are money and housing, and the report takes those seriously. But its centerpiece is a new survey of 4,784 Americans between 18 and 50, and the results point somewhere else: at peer culture.

The researchers asked respondents how many kids their three closest friends had, and how those friends would react if the respondent had another baby. Would they offer to help? Cook meals after the birth? Or would they worry about their career stalling or stop inviting them out?

The answers were associated, to a startling degree, with the desire to have children. For Americans under 30 with the least supportive friends, desired family size was about 1.7 children. For those with the most supportive friends, it was 2.8. That is a full extra child, associated with nothing more than having trusted friends who show up.

Compare that with religion, the variable social scientists often concentrate on when looking at birth rates. Young Americans who never attend religious services want about two children. Regular attendees want about 2.7. Religion matters, but helpful friends matter just as much, if not more, and the statistical models suggest the two effects are separate.

Additionally, having friends with kids predicts wanting more kids yourself. The report shares a striking null result: the closeness of people’s relationships with their own parents predicts almost nothing about how many children they want. The average family size of peers matters about twice as much as the respondent’s own number of siblings in childhood.

Psychologists will not find this shocking. Humans are mimetic creatures. We calibrate our appetites, our outlooks, and our life plans by watching the people around us, as well as the people just above us. So it should not surprise us that the report finds a “celebrity effect” as well.

Respondents named the public figure they most admired. The researchers then looked up how many children that figure had. Each additional child born to an admired celebrity predicted about 0.15 more desired children for the fan. The effect was strongest among young women.

It is “empirically possible,” the authors write, “that paying Taylor Swift a billion dollars to have children might produce more children in society than spending the same money on child tax credits, if her choice sways her wide fanbase.”

Still, there is a crucial catch in the data. Admired celebrities and friends with kids shape what people want. They do not shape what people do. When the researchers looked at actual intentions—meaning couples who wanted more children and concretely planned to have them—the celebrity effect nearly vanished.

In fact, the only social variable that still moved intentions was having friends who would actually help: watch the baby, bring the meals, change the diapers. Having supportive friends raised the share of couples intending to have another child from around 30 percent to about 45 percent.

Put simply: ambient culture sets the aspiration, but real-world friends lead to actual births. A society can be awash in pro-family influencers and still be barren if nobody is willing to babysit.

Friendship, though, is collapsing. The number of close friends Americans report has been falling for decades. Time spent with friends has dropped sharply, particularly for the young. The report cites new economics research with a title that says it all: “Is the iPhone Birth Control?” The study contends that smartphone adoption itself depressed birthrates.

Seen this way, the fertility crisis looks less like an economic problem and more like a downstream symptom of the loneliness problem. The friendship recession and the baby bust are the same recession.

What to do? Stone and Brookes offer a policy program bolder than the usual child tax-credit tinkering. The flagship is what they call American Birthday Accounts: invest $15,000 at every citizen’s birth, let it compound, and unlock it only when that child grows up and has children of his or her own. A married couple could receive on the order of $100,000 at a first birth. The authors estimate that this could raise birthrates by 20 to 40 percent, at a cost of less than 1 percent of the federal budget.

But the more original ideas are the cultural ones, and they follow from the friendship data. Perhaps most provocatively, the authors suggest “digital blue laws” that would tax smartphone data usage on weekends to nudge people off their phones and back into each other’s living rooms.

Some of these ideas will strike readers as fanciful. But the diagnosis behind them is hard to dismiss. For most of human history, children were raised inside a thick web of siblings, neighbors, and friends. Nobody had to be persuaded that family life was aspirational, because it was visible everywhere. We have thinned that web to a few strands and are surprised that people hesitate to envision babies within it.

The report ends with a note of optimism: demographic decline is a choice, and choices can be reversed. The question is whether Americans are willing to rebuild the ordinary social world that once made children thinkable: full pews, crowded porches, friends within walking distance. A country that cannot produce friendship will not produce much of anything else.

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This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. The original can be found here.

Rob Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a City Journal contributing editor, and the best-selling author of Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.

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