• The US birth rate hit a historic low as Americans face rising childcare and living costs.
• Millennials and Gen Z are delaying parenthood for financial stability.
• Still, many Americans say they want more children than they currently have.

Americans want more kids — but many can't swing higher daycare, grocery, and household bills.

The US birth rate has been steadily declining for over a decade. The general fertility rate reached a historic low in 2023, per the most recently available Center for Disease Control data. Between 2014 to 2020, the CDC reported that the birth rate consistently dipped by 2% annually.

These figures come as millennials and Gen Zers are waiting longer to become parents: Americans are increasingly holding off until they're more financially stable in their 30s and 40s to have a baby or buy a house.

Financial experts, parents, and young people told Business Insider that the birth rate problem is rooted in household budgets. Even if they wanted more children, some Americans said they couldn't shoulder the expense.

"We are spending so much money just on essentials like groceries," Liv, a 26-year-old childfree adult in Grand Rapids, Michigan told BI. "It's hard to imagine giving a kid everything they could ever need or want."

Gallup polls conducted in summer 2023 found that many Americans feel the ideal number of kids is more than they currently have. The polls, which surveyed at least 1,000 US adults aged 18 and older, reported that a plurality of people with zero to two kids said two is the ideal number.

Americans' preference for larger families is also on the rise. The share of adults who believe three or more children is the ideal amount jumped four percentage points between 2018 and 2023 — reaching its highest point since 1971, per Gallup data. Black adults, more religious adults, and younger adults are more likely to favor larger families. Overall, nine in 10 adults said they have children or would like to have children.

Whether Americans will choose to grow their families, however, is more complicated. Childcare costs are outpacing average salaries in some cities, the price of many staple foods are increasing, and healthcare continues to be costly.

With a quickly aging US population and workforce, boosting the birth rate would be good news for the economy in the long run. But some policy advocates have said that America's birth rate can't be restored without alleviating financial pressure for families and young people. Policies like the child tax credit, government-subsidized childcare, and basic income programs for parents have been tried across the US as potential solutions.

"This is not just an individual parent problem," said Anne Hedgepeth, the senior vice president of policy and research at Child Care Aware of America. "That it is very much a problem that we can solve, and we can do that to the benefit of parents, communities, our economy as a whole."

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