There is no question that America, and the world, is going through a tectonic shift in family formation. Marriage rates and birth rates are plummeting nearly everywhere. This has inevitably led to a discourse around what’s happening, why it is happening and what might be done. The vocabulary for this conversation, however, leaves much to be desired — and may actively be hampering an effective societal response.
Consider the recent opinion piece by Alysse ElHage and Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies. Commenting on these marriage and fertility trends, the pair write that “starting in the past decade, the share of ‘kinless’ prime-aged (18-55) adults — defined here as those who are never married and have no children in the home — exceeded the share of Americans who are married with children for the first time in our nation’s history.”
While the data that ElHage and Wilcox share is accurate, their labeling of this group as “kinless” is both wrong and unhelpful.
The label fails firstly as a basic definition. Consult any dictionary, and it is clear the word “kin” is inclusive of extended families, such as parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews. This has long been the accepted meaning: as Hamlet puts it of his uncle-turned-stepfather Claudius in Shakespeare’s play, Claudius is “a little more than kin, and less than kind.” The only way to consider an adult kinless by dint of having never married and having no children is to redefine the word itself.
Yet narrowing “kin” to only one’s spouse and children is foolhardy. Humans were never intended to live in isolated nuclear units, and that connotation devalues the crucial role played by extended families. Moreover, it is easy to see how such a phrase could be used pejoratively to shame those who are unmarried and childless: after all, if having kin is an elemental part of being human, then the lack thereof must represent a striking failure.
To their credit, ElHage and Wilcox concede that “there is a fine line between becoming more marriage friendly as a society and (wrongly) making our single friends and family feel less valuable because they are alone.” However, this feels more like pity than an acknowledgment that those who are single and childless can live richly meaningful lives and contribute immensely to a healthy society. Others have trampled over that line, whether Vice President-elect J.D. Vance’s now infamous “childless cat ladies” quip or Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s barb that “the childless are the ones that are destroying the country.”
A short list of unmarried, childless adults to whom humanity owes a debt of gratitude includes deeply influential figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Florence Nightingale, Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, Kahlil Gibran, Emily Dickinson and Ludwig van Beethoven; the many great humanitarians among nuns, celibate priests and other religious ascetics; and the innumerable loving brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles who have indelibly enhanced their family’s — yes, their kin’s — lives.
To be clear, I count myself among those who are highly concerned about America’s shifting demographic landscape. Broadly speaking, lower birth rates presage strains on economic growth, government budgets and social insurance programs, to say nothing of the more ineffable benefits that children bring to a society. Yet two things can be true: we need to identify the cultural and policy factors driving these trends (some of which, like women’s increased education and agency, are strongly positive) and leading many to not actualize their desired family structure, while also affirming that unmarried, childless adults are in fact part of a healthy societal ecosystem.
This linguistic challenge is not merely a matter of semantics. Reckoning with our new demographic future will require an all-of-society response; not unlike climate change, these demographic shifts are an era-defining context. Maligning those without spouses and children, intentionally or not, is liable to produce a backlash effect wherein those who feel offended harden their belief that declining marriage and birth rates are not a problem. This may be especially true for those on the political left for whom the very phrase “pro-natal” can come across as frankly strange, and where conversations about babies are intensely wrapped up with conversations about reproductive rights.
It’s worth remembering that there is not a consensus explanation for why we are seeing such stark marriage and fertility declines. While many theories have been proposed, ranging from high housing and child care costs to a crisis of meaning-making and religiosity to the spread of pornography and individualistic values through phones and social media, the sociologist Alice Evans notes that none can yet adequately “explain both the global collapse and local variation.”
For the moment, the best path forward is to remain descriptive and curious rather than euphemistic and declarative. Take the data on which ElHage and Wilcox were commenting. There is little reason not to simply state, factually and neutrally, that “the share of prime-aged (18-55) adults who are unmarried and have no children in the home now exceeds the share of Americans who are married with children.” Saying these adults are “kinless” is no way to find a worthy path forward into an uncertain future.
Elliot Haspel is a senior fellow at the family policy think tank Capita.