Maybe the most important work of all. Fortunately, it’s the fun kind. Yesterday, the New York Times ran an alarming story headlined, “U.S. Fertility Rates Drop to Another Record Low.”

“The fertility rate has been falling since 2007,” the Times reported, “a trend that has become something of a demographic mystery.” Experts baffled!There is a terrifying new report out from the federal government, and for once, it is not about the national debt, oil prices, or the sudden, unexplained disappearance of all the good flavors of Doritos.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention —an agency that, when it’s not pushing sketchy jab products, usually spends its time telling us not to overeat raw cookie dough, which is frankly none of their business— the United States fertility rate has dropped to an all-time, record-breaking low.

In 2025, there were only about 53 live births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age. The total number of babies born was around 3.6 million. Now, 3.6 million babies might sound like a lot, especially if you have ever been seated near just one of them on a cross-country flight. But statistically speaking, it is a disaster.

Bizarrely, the Times blamed teenagers. “The fertility rate for teenagers dropped by 7 percent from 2024’s figure, setting another record low for the group.” I’m old enough to remember when we were trying to stop teenagers from making babies.

Economists, who are people paid to worry about things using math, tell us that we need a “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman just to keep the population stable. (It’s not clear how the .1 kids fit into car seats.) We are currently well below that rate. We are not replacing ourselves. We are slowly phasing ourselves out, like vinyl records, the McRib, or basic common sense.

The mainstream media, of course, has decided that this is actually wonderful news. The experts quoted in the Times and other major trad-platforms were doing intellectual backflips to explain why having no children is actually a stroke of economic genius.

One Ivy League professor argued that having fewer kids is great because we can “invest more in the quality of each child.” Yes, he used the word “quality.” Because children are apparently like flat-screen televisions. You don’t want five dinky, blurry ones; you want one massive, high-definition plasma unit that can connect to the Wi-Fi and eventually get into Georgetown.

These experts argue that, with fewer children, parents can spend more money on essential developmental tools, like organic, locally sourced wooden blocks, and private cello lessons for toddlers. They also argue that fewer people are better for the planet, because a smaller population emits less carbon, consumes fewer resources, and produces fewer survival-based reality television shows. (‘The planet’ was unavailable for comment.)

But out here in the real world, where we actually need young people to eventually take over paying for stuff like Social Security and Medicare, the math is looking grim.

Here is how Social Security works: You toil in a job for your entire life, the government takes a regular chunk of your paycheck, and they promise to give it back to you when you are too old to remember where you put your reading glasses. But they don’t actually put your money in a vault. Don’t be silly. They immediately invest it in things like studying the inclusivity of Peruvian tree frogs and speculative Somalian daycare schemes.

So, to pay us back, they need a constant influx of young, working people to pay taxes. It is often called a federally mandated Ponzi scheme, but with worse hold music when you call customer service.

When we stop having babies, we start running out of young people. It’s not complicated. And when we run out of young people, there is nobody left to pay into the system. As of 2024, retirees already outnumber children in nearly half of U.S. counties. We are rapidly approaching a demographic cliff where the entire American economy will consist of 85-year-olds trying to pay each other in butterscotch candies.

👶 So, why are Americans not having kids? (It’s not just America. But it is also America.)

The baffled experts gas on about “economic anxiety” and “climate change” and the fact that college tuition now costs roughly the same as a medium-sized nuclear submarine. But those are also the same experts who are constantly creating the anxiety about climate change. Spending twenty years telling people that having kids is an environmental crime, then acting surprised when they stop is peak expert.

I suspect the real reason is much simpler: Have you met children lately?

They are exhausting. They require constant supervision, they refuse to eat anything that isn’t shaped like a dinosaur —even chicken nuggets— and they are legally required to throw a tantrum in the middle of Target. Raising a child today means navigating a terrifying gauntlet of screen-time limits, peanut allergies, school boards, drag queen story hours, vaccine mandates, and modern math homework, which no longer uses numbers, but instead relies on a system of abstract shapes that represent the cosines of emotional feelings.

In the old days, people had large families because they needed ‘hands’ to work the family farm. Today, if you ask most teenagers to weed the garden, they will look at you in flabbergasted astonishment, like you just asked them to translate the Rosetta Stone without their cell phone.

Some politicians are floating big ideas. There is talk of “baby bonuses” and federal tax credits. But let’s be honest: If you are the kind of person who decides whether or not to create a human life based on a $5,000 tax credit (* results may vary), you probably shouldn’t be in charge of a virtual cartoon hamster, let alone a baby.

The truth is, raising a family is an act of profound optimism. It is a statement that, despite the inflation, the crazy politicians, and the fact that they keep canceling all the good TV shows, the future is still worth investing in. We need more optimism. And more babymaking.

So, do your part for America. Have a kid. Or at the very least, try harder. You might like it.