If you’re a US citizen expecting a baby in 2026, there’s good news. The Federal government wants to give your child some money.

　　Starting this year, any US citizen under 18 qualifies for a 530A “Trump Account,” sometimes referred to as a “Kid IRA.” Parents, grandparents, or other loved ones can contribute up to $5000 per year, which will be tax-deferred until the child turns 18. The money will then be available to the child for major life events, such as going to college, buying their first home, or starting a small business. For babies born between 2025 and 2028, there’s a special bonus; the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 provides for a $1,000 gift from the Federal government, deposited as “seed money” for newborns. The goal, ostensibly, is to ensure that every American child, from the day of birth, can “own a piece of the American dream.”

　　This isn’t the sort of family policy we’ve come to expect from ostensibly pro-family countries. Maybe that’s good. Where some nations have raced to give parents short-term assistance with childcare, groceries, and the like, this policy tries to open pathways to brighter, more prosperous futures for American kids. It’s hard to say whether this will have any meaningful impact on birth rates, but it might be worth a try, because the other kind of family policy doesn’t seem to be working very well. Over the last ten years, the pronatal case for cradle-to-grave state largesse has become exceedingly weak.

　　France and Sweden, once held up as standout examples of successful state-supported population growth, have seen their birth rates slump. As a percent of GDP, these countries now spend double (or more) what the United States does on family policy, with birth rates similar to or lower than ours. Hungary, likewise, has massively increased its spending on families, leading to a quick bounce in birth rates, followed by a demoralizing slide. Hungary now spends an astonishing 5 percent of its GDP on family benefits, compared to less than 1 percent here in the United States. Our TFR (Total Fertility Rate) is higher. 

　　Family life can be fruitful not in a potted-plant sort of way, but in a cultivated garden sort of way. 

　　No sane person sees “Trump Accounts” as a comprehensive solution to the birth dearth, but it certainly makes no sense to follow high-subsidy countries down an expensive path to nowhere. We need a response that’s more innovative, and more reflective of the things Americans value, such as freedom and dynamism. I like to think of this alternative approach to family policy as “libertarian pronatalism.” For me personally, this is a bit awkward; I’ve never thought of myself as a “libertarian,” and in recent years I’ve become increasingly leery of the term “pronatalist.” (It used to mean simply a person who thinks it would be good if Americans had more babies. Now it’s often read as support for a whole range of unethical practices and revanchist ideals, from mandatory tradwivery to polygenic embryo selection.) Nevertheless, I think good things might happen at the point where the two meet.

　　In what follows, I will suggest three key principles that could be foundational to a libertarian pronatalist position. The policy component still needs work, but the principles point in a direction, and it’s not towards Paris. 

　　1) Entitlement reform is the best pronatalist policy there is.

　　Birth rates have fallen for many reasons, but the entitlement state is clearly one. Elderly entitlements are the worst offenders: they socialize one of the major benefits of children while privatizing the cost. Over the longer run, entitlements also seem to erode family networks, and perhaps especially intergenerational dependence and closeness, teaching people to view the state as the presumptive caretaker instead of kith and kin.

　　The problem has become obvious. Very few now bother to deny the causal link between the entitlement state and the birth dearth. Why then do family policy advocates overwhelmingly prefer to advocate for more entitlement spending instead of less? In part, no doubt, this reflects the natural reluctance people feel to try to tackle one thorny problem by taking on another. Everyone who’s paying attention knows that entitlement reform needs to happen, but there’s no appetite for getting started; it’s one of our best-documented and most intractable fiscal problems. Unsurprisingly then, family policy advocates are disinclined to attempt one hard thing by lashing it to another difficult thing we seem totally unable to do.

　　There’s another way to look at this, though. Maybe these problems actually complement one another in a useful way. Entitlement reform is a policy problem that we can’t seem to solve for political reasons; cratering birth rates are a political and cultural problem without a clear application to policy. People feel the sadness of declining cities and sterile family trees on a very visceral level, but because solutions seem so elusive, this can easily end in paralysis and despair. What if that emotion could be channeled in a more productive direction? Could they be persuaded to think of entitlement reform as their great gift to the future?

　　2) Parents should ideally be viewed as creators and innovators, not victims or natural wards of the state.

　　Suppose you run a company, and you notice that a vital and once-flourishing department is looking sluggish. They’re not performing up to previous standards. You investigate and discover that the department is short-staffed and wrestling with a few equipment and workflow challenges, but beyond that, it’s just blanketed in a more general malaise. Morale is low, and very few people anywhere in the company seem able to explain this department’s purpose, or give reasons why anyone would want to work there. As a good CEO, you will naturally think, “I need to recruit some good, energized people to that department, and try to change the tone.” You probably will not begin by installing deep armchairs, serving lavish lunches, or issuing company-wide assurances that anyone willing to transfer to that department will be kept safe and comfortable regardless of the quality of the work. Innovation tends to be spurred, not by greater comfort, but by the promise that good work has real value and can bring great reward.

　　Parenting is hard, especially in the early years, when every resource seems sapped to the limit. Young families do sometimes need a helping hand. But the comprehensive pronatal policy embraced in Sweden or Hungary goes well beyond that, treating everyday family needs as fundamentally the state’s responsibility. Parents and children join the poor, sick, disabled, and elderly as “needy people” requiring a big, enveloping hug from the state. Fertility, in this approach, really is functionally equivalent to a disease. It’s just another recognized reason for going on the dole, like a debilitating illness or workplace accident. This doesn’t look like a recipe for revitalizing family life. It’s a program of managed decline.

　　Maybe vibrant, hopeful cultures simply lead people to want children more.

　　When the state becomes the presumptive source of support for families (not in extremis but simply as a matter of course), that will sap parents’ natural inclination to explore organic solutions to family challenges. They’re less likely to build mutually supportive communities, demand helpful products, or look for new ways to combine work and parenting constructively. Raising kids will naturally become a “safe but low-status” option for the less-than-motivated, the “department” of American society for people who definitely prefer security to challenge and risk. And that department will continue to stagnate.

　　It doesn’t have to be like that. Parenting can be creative and innovative. It’s a form of dynamic “making” that’s within reach for all sorts of people who will never be at the cutting edge of a professional field. Family life can be fruitful not in a potted-plant sort of way, but in a cultivated garden sort of way.This is the kind of image we should want people to have of parenthood.

　　I think it’s possible, but it will require a paradigm shift. People need to shed the old paradigm by which the office is “work” and the household “the thing for which we work.” That was the preferred mid-twentieth-century ideal, but it always left housewives in an odd space (do they “work” too, and if so, how are they trained, hired, and compensated?), and at this point, it’s more harmful than helpful. The office and the home are better understood as complementary spheres, both dynamic and productive in different ways. This leads to a final point.

　　3) Fiscal and human capital tend to support one another.

　　In the twentieth century, we learned, contrary to widespread expectation, that more human capital tends to mean more capital of other kinds. I sometimes wonder whether we’ll spend the twenty-first century figuring out that the reverse is also true.

　　You can understand why the Malthusians struggled to grasp this first point. More people need more food, more land, more resources of every kind. Many of those resources are scarce. Surely an exploding population will cause all kinds of problems? The late Paul Ehrlich amply showed how that kind of anxiety could give rise to a robust anti-natalism that made sterility seem positively virtuous.

　　But it turns out that population growth also tends to mean economic growth, discovery and innovation, and prosperity. Humans are themselves the resource needed to facilitate the maintenance of more humans. Stringent population controls were as horrifying as they were unnecessary.

　　In a similar way, one can understand why people today are inclined to see economic growth as inimical to family life. When markets are expanding and opportunities are plentiful, domestic life may take a back seat to other pursuits. The opportunity cost of child-rearing becomes much steeper, even as the pleasures of childless adult life become more plentiful. Meanwhile, even as the sacrifices get harder, those who make them may not get much respect, because a society focused on money and professional achievement doesn’t always cultivate a high appreciation of caretakers and homemakers. In short, markets create competition, not just between rival businesses but also for young adults’ time and attention.

　　There’s an obvious sense in which this is true. Individual people do clearly agonize over the trade-offs associated with child-rearing. But it may be that a fixation on those short-term calculations is too blinkered, just as the Malthusian obsession with scarcity was blind to the larger picture. Maybe vibrant, hopeful cultures simply lead people to want children more. One major payoff for parenting is the joy of watching your children flourish, continuing your legacy, and passing on the traditions that you transmitted to them. Those incentives will only be motivating, though, for people who have something to pass on, along with real hope that those traditions will survive.

　　Tim Carney notes in his book, Family Unfriendly, that birth rates cratered earliest and most dramatically in Japan and Germany, the losers of the Second World War. He hypothesizes that a kind of “civilizational sadness” undermines people’s sense of having anything to pass on to future generations. By contrast, Israel is a noteworthy outlier to global birth trends, with a birth rate above replacement. It’s well known that religious women are far more likely to have many children, even with high levels of education.

　　Prosperity and opportunity may compete with family life in certain ways, but ultimately, thriving and energetic societies tend to compensate for those competing demands with less-quantifiable goods. Hope is harder to measure than a child bonus, but it may ultimately matter far more.

　　The “Kid IRA,” even with the thousand-dollar Federal gift, will not transform our culture overnight. It won’t be the knock-down argument that persuades someone that they do, after all, want another child. Realistically, though, there probably is no such argument. Depopulation is a long-term problem that will be with us for some time to come. It makes sense to play it as a long game. Instead of begging people to have kids, try to grow a cultural climate in which family life is appealing and rewarding.

　　It may take some time to figure out if a libertarian pronatalist strategy is working. Sometimes good things are worth the wait.