“People are making rational choices about how difficult it is to be a parent,” says CPC Director Karen Guzzo
This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 2, 2025.
By Rachel Wolfe
Fertility rates in the U.S. have never been lower. Could $1,000 “Trump accounts” for newborns, plus Tuesday’s announcement of an additional $250 for some children 10 and under, convince Americans to have more kids?
The money can’t generally be tapped until a child turns 18 at the earliest, so it won’t offer what parents say they need most: financial help while their children are young. Yet the policy’s supporters say the accounts are a step in the right direction, and could help shift thinking around family formation on the whole.
“For most of my life we’ve been told that having kids is a burden, we should put it off, we should prioritize ourselves and our careers,” said Michael Knowles, a 35-year-old conservative podcaster for the Daily Wire and cigar company owner with three kids under the age of five. “The very fact of our government putting money aside for children re-establishes the old standard that it’s good to have kids.”
Knowles, who lives in Nashville, Tenn., was already planning to expand his family, and says the extra $1,000 for kids born in 2025 through 2028 isn’t likely to change the number he and his wife will have. But he says he will sign up each of his children for the accounts to get the $250 (which Michael and Susan Dell have promised to give to kids 10 and under in zip codes with median household incomes under $150,000) as soon as he’s able.
Blake Moore, a Republican congressman from Utah, sponsored the provision in the reconciliation bill for the Trump accounts. He says the policy isn’t meant to boost the fertility rate, but is intended to invest in the next generation.
“You see how the Trump administration cares about upward mobility and economic prosperity for families,” Moore said.
He plans to create Trump accounts for his three who qualify for the $250, and to “match” the Dells’ $6.25 billion investment with $60 per kid. “That’s creating shockwaves across the country today,” he joked, referring to his match.
The White House’s announcement didn’t address declining birth rates but rather helping children achieve economic stability as adults. President Trump said the accounts would give children “a shot at the American dream.” But the move comes amid a broader push on the right to figure out how to motivate young people to start families. The new tax law also raised and extended the maximum child tax credit to $2,200 per child for 2025, and scheduled future inflation adjustments.
But the tax law didn’t return to the fully refundable child tax credit for low income families that was in place during 2021. And the new accounts aren’t likely to change the math on raising young children, or be anywhere near enough to persuade people to have them in the first place.
People cite cost-of-living concerns as a major reason for delaying childbearing or having fewer kids than they say they desire, according to research from the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
More young couples say they feel they need to be established in their careers and financially secure before having kids, and standards have risen for what parents want to provide. Real costs have risen too: More dual-income households mean child care is a necessity. The median cost of sending one child to daycare for five years is about $44,000 across the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Labor Department data. Trump’s new tax law expands some tax breaks for child care.
“People are making really rational choices about how difficult it is to be a parent and how the stakes seem higher and higher,” said Karen Guzzo, a family demographer at the Carolina Population Center.
Efforts in other countries to subsidize child-rearing and boost fertility have largely fallen flat. In Japan and Hungary, for example, policies like expanded paid family leave and monthly per-child allowances led to only modest increases in the birthrate.
But those types of policies are very different from what the Trump administration is laying out.
“If I have a baby today, I need money today, I don’t need money when my kid turns 18,” said Guzzo.
Terry Schilling, who runs conservative political ads as head of the American Principles Project, says that he sees Trump accounts as a “great starting point at shifting our economy toward the next generation.” Millennials and Gen Z, he says, are the first generations to inherit a worse country and economy than their parents. “We need to fix that, and soon, or else we will lose our country to socialism,” he said, pointing to how Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was able to win the New York City mayoral election in part by appealing to young people’s economic anxieties.
Roger Severino, head of domestic policy for conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, attributes the decline in the fertility and marriage rates to young people wanting to “get all their ducks in a row” before starting a family. He thinks this policy will help address that anxiety, “because they’ll have some assurance that there will be a nest egg waiting for their kids down the road,” he said, adding that today’s kids could use that money to one day start families of their own.
Hadley Heath Manning lives in Denver with her husband and four kids, all of whom would qualify for the Dell family’s $250-per-child donation.
In her work as a fellow for conservative economic policy organization Independent Women, she has researched the factors driving down the fertility rate. That includes changing social norms as well as financial, emotional and time constraints.
“I’ll take the money,” she said. “But it’s probably not going to produce a fifth Manning child.”