Michael Alexis Garcia

August 20, 2025

Don’t Panic: Population Projection is Not a Crystal Ball

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Amanda Jean Stevenson, Department of Sociology and Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado Boulder, together with Shelley Clark, Department of Sociology, McGill University, Jennifer Beam Dowd, Department of Population Health and Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, University of Oxford, Alison Gemmill, Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health and Hopkins Population Center, Johns Hopkins University, Karen Benjamin Guzzo, Department of Sociology and Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Sarah R. Hayford, Department of Sociology and Institute for Population Research, Ohio State University, Laura D. Lindberg, School of Public Health, Rutgers University, and Leslie Root, Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado Boulder.

August 20th, 2025

Population panic – worries about “depopulation” linked to low birth rates – has become pervasive, with dire predictions in both the short and long term. Yet demographers like us – experts who explicitly study population size, composition, and structure – are generally not highly concerned. Why is this? It’s because we understand the strengths and limitations of population projections. Projections can accurately describe how populations will change if we know future birth, death, and migration rates. But demographers are well aware that they don’t have a crystal ball – we can’t fully anticipate economic shifts, political changes, global events, or how future generations will respond to their changing worlds. That’s why the farther we project from the present, the less accurate those projections are likely to be.

What are Population Projections?

In demography, our most common population projection tool is called cohort component projection. This tool treats different age groups (cohorts) separately, applying rates representing the three components of population change – birth, death, and migration – to each one. A cohort component projection begins with a baseline population (usually based on high quality censuses and surveys) and our most recent birth, death, and migration rates. Then, we make our best guesses about birth, death, and migration rates for every year in the projection. At least initially, our best guess is that future rates will be similar to current rates. We apply our estimate of next year’s rates to the baseline population, generating a projected population for the next year. Then we take this projected population and repeat the process, applying likely future rates for each year in turn until we reach the final projected year. To project a population fifty years into the future, we do this process fifty times, with each year’s projections feeding into the next.

Therefore, population projections require that we use expected birth, death, and migration rates for each year between the baseline data and the end of the projection. For example, if we want to project the US population in 2030 based on 2024 data, we must come up with likely birth, death, and migration rates for 2025, 2026, 2027, 2028, and 2029. And because it is a cohort-based model, it uses a separate birth, death, or migration rate for each 5- or 10-year age group. This can easily mean juggling dozens of rates just to project forward one year.

The best way to get those dozens of rates for each year is to rely on current rates and recent trends. This works well when things are changing slowly and in predictable ways, but it means our projections are often limited to forecasting a future that’s a lot like the present.

How Good are Demographic Projections at Predicting the Future?

Historically, demographic forecasts have often not anticipated major changes in birth, death, and migration. For example, much like today, in the 1930s and 1940s many commentators bemoaned the low fertility of the time. Expert projections of US population from the 1930s assumed that fertility would remain relatively constant into the future. They imagined fertility rates would continue as they were indefinitely, yielding rapid population aging and slow population growth. Yet fertility did not remain low – instead we got the Baby Boom. As a result, population projections from the 1930s and 1940s predicted actual future population size quite poorly.

To illustrate this point, the figure[1] to the right compares Social Security Administration population projections from 1946 (dotted lines) with the actual US population (solid black line). Four different projections were prepared in 1946, each making assumptions of birth, death, and migration rates at various levels. It is clear that even the most “optimistic” 1946 projection, represented by “B” line, underestimated the actual US population by 1950. Moreover, the magnitude of underestimation increased over time. This illustrates how differences between what we think birth, death, and migration rates might be – our assumptions about the future – and the actual course of events compound over time. Any differences between expected rates and actual future rates can yield increasingly large differences between population projections and the eventual reality.

Human history demonstrates that the past is the best predictor of tomorrow…right up until it isn’t. At their best, population projections are well-informed extrapolations of current information. Things change – and the likelihood of change increases as periods of projection get longer. The discussions around low birth rates that warn of rapid aging, fiscal shortfalls, empty kindergartens, and ultimately population collapse all assume that current trends will continue indefinitely. We should all be skeptical of that.

Acknowledgment

This work benefited from research, administrative, and computing support provided by the University of Colorado Population Center, funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (Project 2P2CHD066613-06); the Carolina Population Center, funded by NICHD (Project 5P2CHD050924-20); The Ohio State University’s Institute for Population Research, funded by NICHD (Project 5P2CHD058484-15); and the Hopkins Population Center, funded by NICHD (Project P2CHD042854-20). The authors would like to thank the staff at CCF for their assistance with the production of this article and the CCF editorial board for their helpful comments in drafting this brief.

For More Information, Please Contact:

Amanda Jean Stevenson
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
Director of Population Program, Institute of Behavioral Science
University of Colorado Boulder
Amanda.Stevenson@Colorado.edu

[1] Projections: Myers, Robert J. Projections from Illustrative U.S. Population Projection, 1946. January 1948. Office of the Actuary, Social Security Administration. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_studies/study024.pdf

Decennial populations 1950-2010: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange-data-text.html

Estimated actual population for June 5, 2025: https://www.census.gov/popclock/

June 12, 2025

Father’s Day Brief: A Gift for Dad that Benefits the Whole Family

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACTS:

Daniel L. Carlson / University of Utah / daniel.carlson@fcs.utah.edu
Richard J. Petts / Ball State University / rjpetts@bsu.edu

AUSTIN, TX, June 12, 2025—Dads, are you tired of getting ties and socks and grooming kits you don’t need for Father’s Day? How about flipping the script and giving your family a gift — one that will give you a lot more joy over the long run than another personalized mug or pint glass? The gift we refer to is the gift of your time in childcare and housework. It’s a gift that truly keeps on giving, benefiting you, your kids, your partner, and your relationships for years to come.

When fathers share childcare and housework equally with their partners, both they and their partners report better relationship quality, including less conflict, more relationship satisfaction, better communication, and more sexual intimacy. Children with involved dads report stronger relationships with their fathers, are healthier and happier overall, and are even less stressed as adults. Fathers themselves also benefit personally from doing childcare and housework, as enhanced relationship quality from sharing the load leads to greater life satisfaction and better physical and mental health.

The benefits of father involvement at home apply not just to physical household labor but also to cognitive labor, which is the mental work of managing a household. For example, while cooking dinner is a physical household task, planning weekly meals is a mental one. Both mothers and fathers who share such organizing and planning tasks report lower levels of stress and fewer depressive symptoms than when mothers do most of this work. Additionally, both mothers and fathers also report higher relationship satisfaction when cognitive labor is shared equally. In fact, fathers’ sharing the mental labor matters more for parents’ relationship satisfaction than the division of physical housework tasks.

So, dads, this Father’s Day think about giving your family the gift of your time in housework and childcare. Doing so might not just be the greatest Father’s Day gift you ever got or gave yourself, it’s also likely to make your wife a lot happier than the card or flowers you got her for Mother’s Day (nice as those may have been). In turn, instead of being treated as a household helper who receives orders from your wife, she may treat you as an equal partner in parenting and housework – enabling you to be closer to your family and reap all the benefits that come from these enriched relationships.

May 8, 2025

Worrying About Being a Perfect Mother Makes It Harder to Be a Good Parent

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University. This is an updated version of a paper published previously at The Conversation.

May 8, 2025

There are many complex reasons behind America’s falling birthrates. Many Americans feel freer today than in the past to construct enriching lives that don’t include parenting. But it’s also true that on average, Americans are having fewer children than they say they would prefer. Economic uncertainty and the lack of social policy supports for parents in the U.S. are clear contributors. In addition, parents report concerns about global instability and climate change.

But there may be another less obvious factor in Americans’ reluctance to become parents or to have larger families. Parenting has become the source of so much anxiety for parents, particularly mothers, that it can seem impossible to do it right. When 20-something women in my neighborhood and among my students discuss their ambivalence about becoming parents, much of the anxiety revolves around the fact that they have set the bar so high for “good parenting.”

Even armed with a Ph.D. in developmental psychology, I too worried about whether I could meet that bar. I vividly remember the frightening first moments after bringing my newborn daughter home from the hospital. I wasn’t sure what to do—and not at all confident that I was capable of being the parent she needed me to be. Every little decision about feeding and caring for this helpless human seemed momentous and fraught with anxiety. What if I don’t make it a full year of breastfeeding? Would feeding her formula result in a lower IQ? Should I turn off the TV whenever she is in the room to avoid passive screen exposure? When would it be OK for her to enter full-time day care? I worried that if I was too tired to read to her one evening before bed, she would never learn to read. As she grew into early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence, the content of the worries shifted (When is it OK for her to have a smartphone? Should I be tracking her location on Life 360?) but the sense that I wasn’t quite good enough for the “most challenging job in the world” didn’t quit.

My personal experiences as a parent are in part why I study the experiences of other parents. In my New Parents Project, an ongoing longitudinal study of nearly 200 dual-earner couples who welcomed their first children in 2008-2009, I have found that this kind of “parenting perfectionism”—holding oneself to impossibly high standards for parenting, and, perhaps even more important, believing that other people hold such high standards for you—is common among mothers and related to lower confidence in parenting and even feelings of depression.

Pressure to Be Perfect

Mothers didn’t always feel this perfectionist pressure. In the 1960s, for example, when far fewer mothers worked outside the home, mothers spent about half as much time in direct interaction with their children as mothers do today.

Yet, since the last decade of the 20th century, even as mothers entered the workforce in greater numbers and for greater numbers of hours, norms for mothering evolved toward an “intensive mothering” ideal. This norm dictates that mothers’ parenting should be time-consuming, emotionally absorbing, and guided by expert advice. This pressure is particularly intense for middle-class mothers, who often practice a childrearing style called concerted cultivation, an approach identified by Annette Lareau in the early 2000s. This style focuses on deliberately providing children with experiences and activities to help them develop intellectual and social skills that will serve them well in an increasingly unequal and competitive society. More recent research, however, indicates that intensive parenting ideals have now become pervasive across social classes in the U.S.

Striving for Perfection Can Harm Parenting

Ironically, however, the felt pressure to be a “perfect” mother may actually harm a mother’s parenting. In my lab’s research on new parents, we found that mothers showed less confidence in their parenting abilities when they were more worried about what other people thought about their parenting.

The popularity of social media has likely exacerbated this phenomenon because parents can look at what other parents are doing—even in ostensibly private moments—and judge themselves in comparison. In my research, when we asked new parents about their Facebook use, mothers who were more frequent visitors to the site and who managed their accounts more frequently reported higher levels of parenting stress. New mothers who were highly perfectionistic about parenting were the ones who used Facebook more frequently, and this greater use was linked to increases in depressive symptoms. Decades of research have demonstrated that mothers who experience depression act in more negative and less positive ways toward their children.

Thus, the irony is that in seeking perfection in parenting, parents are less likely to actually parent effectively. Worrying about what others think of their parenting saps mothers’ confidence, leading them to experience parenting as less enjoyable and more stressful. When faced with inevitable parenting challenges, mothers with lower confidence and more parenting stress give up more quickly. Perfectionistic mothers may also engage in gatekeeping by correcting or criticizing fathers’ interactions with children, which can push fathers away from active involvement in parenting, thereby increasing the burden on themselves. Mothers may end up feeling burnt out—emotionally exhausted and distanced from their children.

What Does a ‘Good’ Parent Look Like?

There may be disagreement among child development experts about issues such as screen time or sleep routines, but there is striking agreement about the key elements of “good” parenting, even if consensus is less likely to make headlines than the latest parenting controversy.

Good parenting has a lot more to do with the “how” than the “what.” Good parents are those who are sensitive to their children’s needs, and “in tune” with their children such that they parent in harmony with their child’s unique characteristics and shift their parenting in response to changes in their child’s development. Children thrive when their parents are consistent, warm, hold high expectations for children’s behavior, explain the reasons behind their rules, and negotiate when appropriate.

Greater stress about parenting further depletes parents’ psychological resources, which may in turn affect their ability to adapt to the changing needs of their children and regulate their own emotions and behavior when parenting their children.

In other words, when you lack confidence and feel chronically stressed about parenting, it is hard to be sensitive, warm, and consistent. You are more likely to yell when you intended to explain calmly to your toddler to stop banging their plate on the table for the millionth time. You may find yourself mentally “checked out” when your baby looks at you and gurgles or when your teen wants to tell you all about the latest season of Ginny & Georgia. You may give in to your preschooler’s endless demands for more Squishmallows.

So, this Mother’s Day, whether you are a mother, expecting your first child, or are thinking of becoming a mother someday, don’t shoot yourself in the foot by holding yourself to impossibly high parenting standards. Remember that the big picture is what is important. Be aware that what other mothers post on Facebook or Instagram may not represent the reality of their parenting experiences. View the latest parenting advice or fad with a skeptical eye. On Mother’s Day—and every day—the best gift you can give yourself and your (future) children may be permission to be imperfect.

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank the staff at CCF for their assistance with the production of this article and Stephanie Coontz for her helpful comments in drafting this brief.

For More Information, Please Contact:

Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan
Professor, Department of Psychology
The Ohio State University
schoppe-sullivan.1@osu.edu

April 2, 2025

Getting a Degree in a System not Built for Them: Few Student Parents get Help from their Parents when Paying for College

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Renee Ryberg, Child Trends, and Arielle Kuperberg, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

April 2, 2025

One in five students at community and four-year colleges in the United States are raising children while trying to earn their degrees—and this number may grow as access to abortion becomes more limited. Many student parents find themselves in precarious economic positions, and are often on their own to pay for college. As we found in a new study of students at two public four-year universities, fewer than 1 in 10 (9%) student parents got financial help from their own parents to pay for college tuition or living expenses. By contrast, nearly two-thirds (64%) of childless students received financial help from their parents.

The higher education landscape continues to evolve, serving a more diverse student body. The average college student today is no longer the carefree, wealthy 18–22-year-old highlighted in American movies. Although higher education—and the economic benefits that come with it—are available to more people, there is a fundamental mismatch between how colleges were designed and the realities of many of today’s students. Higher education was designed for students to depend on their families, with students’ parents largely footing the bill.

But, as our new study in The Journal of Higher Education finds, that is often not the reality students with children face. Although student parents tend to be older than students without children, differences in age or background (race, parents’ education, region, gender, grew up in US) don’t explain all of the gap in help from their parents. When examining students of the same age and background, we found that the odds that a student parent received help from their parents to pay for college was one-third of that of a student without children.

This disparity puts barriers to graduation in front of the 3.1 million undergraduate student parents pursuing higher education to better the lives of themselves and their children. Instead of getting help from their parents, student parents must draw on a unique and complex set of resources to pay for tuition and living expenses while navigating a college system that was not designed for them.

Examining how Student Parents Pay for College

To examine how student parents pay for college, we analyzed unique survey data collected in 2017 from 2,830 students at two regional public universities. Of those who completed the survey, 338, or 12 percent, identified as parents—a rate comparable to the national rate of student parents at public four-year colleges and universities.

More than half of the student parents that we surveyed used student loans, Pell grants, or money earned from a job to pay for college—the same resources that many of their fellow students without children rely on. But, parents and nonparents rely on these resources to different degrees. And, student parents can’t count on their families to pay for higher education in the same way that childless students do—and the way the system was designed.

Why don’t students with children get support from their parents when paying for college? After all, they have additional expenses and responsibilities compared to students without children.

One reason is that students who have children are more likely to be considered “adults,” so their families may believe that they should be more financially independent. Or, their families may want to support them through college – but may not be able to do so. Student parents tend to come from families with fewer resources, so their parents may not have extra cash on hand to help them with rent or tuition.

So how do student parents pay for college, if they aren’t getting help from their parents?

Instead of Relying on Support from their Parents, Student Parents Rely on Support from Romantic Partners and the Government

Many student parents rely on support from romantic partners, including spouses: in our survey we found that 43 percent of student parents used a partner’s money to pay for educational and living expenses, compared with less than 10 percent of students without children.

The support that student parents received from their partners didn’t necessarily make up for not getting financial support from their parents, though. The proportion of student parents who received support from either their parents or partnerswas less than the percent of students without children who received support from their parents.

Student parents also turn to Pell Grants—a federal grant program for students with low incomes or who have parents with low incomes. Two-thirds (66%) of student parents in our study used Pell Grants to pay for college. Once background characteristics are taken into account, the odds that a student parent used Pell Grants was more than three times that of students without children.

Policy Pitfalls for Student Parents

As student parents pursue higher education, they navigate a funding environment at odds with the realities of their lives.

Pell grants do not typically cover the full cost of tuition, much less living expenses. Perhaps because of the relatively low value of Pell grants, and because students with children could not rely on their parents’ financial support, we found student parents took out higher amounts of student loans. They were also more likely to work while in college.

Juggling a job, child care, and college while also navigating a complex financial situation makes it harder to complete a degree. Indeed, research shows that although student parents have GPAs as high as students without children, they are more likely to leave college without a degree.

But completing a college degree can really pay off for student parents—and their children. One study focused on single mothers found that those who completed a four-year degree were one-third as likely as those who had a high school degree to live below the poverty line, and earned an additional $625,000 across their lifetime. Single mothers who completed a college degree were also less likely to use public assistance programs and contributed more tax revenue.

So what can we do to facilitate success for student parents?

Within the financial aid system, it is critical that financial aid officers are trained to best support students with children. Child care expenses can be factored into loan and grant packages, but many financial aid officers do not communicate this information to students. Pell grants can also be expanded to cover a larger share of tuition and living expenses.

Beyond the financial aid system, many student parents are eligible for federal anti-poverty programs aimed at families with children, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Child Care Development Fund (CCDF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and tax credits including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the Child Tax Credit (CTC), and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC). Navigation services on campus can help student parents access this disparate patchwork of supports.

Although many student parents turn to these programs to make ends meet, they are often penalized for being in school. Many of these programs are structured in ways that prevent student parents from receiving full benefits. Work requirements in some states do not fully count going to school. And, other programs, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, provide lower benefits to workers who earn the least money.

Schools can also help lower costs for student parents by expanding affordable child care offerings to their students, and building affordable family housing on campus, as most colleges do not allow students with children to move into campus housing or have on-campus child care for students.

Training financial aid officers on the needs of student parents, expanding Pell funding, reforming anti-poverty programs to value the long-term investment of pursuing higher education, and building infrastructure on campus that supports parents could help support student parents to complete their degrees—increasing their long-term economic stability and self-sufficiency—which will benefit their children as well.

Acknowledgements

The study discussed in this briefing paper is published in The Journal of Higher Education. We would like to thank JR Moller and Stephanie Pruitt for their research assistance. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 1947603, and a University of North Carolina at Greensboro Advancing Research Summer Award Grant and Faculty Research Grant, as administered by the Office of Sponsored Programs.

Links

Brief report: https://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/2025/04/02/student-parents-brief-report/
Full study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00221546.2025.2480024/

For more information, please contact:

Renee Ryberg, Senior Research Scientist, Child Trends
rryberg@chidltrends.org

Website: https://www.childtrends.org/staff/renee-ryberg
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renee-ryberg-8b2a1a2b/

ABOUT CCF

The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the University of Texas-Austin, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions.

The Council helps keep journalists informed of new and forthcoming research on gender and family-related issues via the CCF Network. To locate researchers or request copies of previous research briefs, please contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, at coontzs@msn.com, cell 360-556-9223.

Read our blog CCF @ The Society Pages – https://thesocietypages.org/ccf/

March 13, 2025

Policies Affecting Families: What we know, and what to expect in the second Trump term

Executive Summary: Policies Affecting Families: What we know, and what to expect in the second Trump term
Arielle Kuperberg

Can Raising the Child Tax Credit Halt Falling U.S. Fertility?
Daniel L. Carlson, Vivekananda Das, and Cole Grevelink

Lessons from the Loan Pause: More Evidence that Student Debt is Reducing Marriage and Childbearing
Arielle Kuperberg, Daniel Collier, Joan Maya Mazelis, and Fenaba Addo

Abortion After the Fall of Roe v. Wade
Alicia M. Walker

Abortion and Immigration are at the forefront of Trump’s plans for his second term: What does this mean for immigrants’ reproductive access?
Sameera Nayak

On Immigration under a Second Trump Presidency
Bethany L. Letiecq

From Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage to Executive Bans on ‘Gender Ideology’: Progress and Setbacks in LGBTQIA+ Laws in the Past Decade
Gina May and Barbara J. Risman

March 13, 2025

Executive Summary: Policies Affecting Families: What we know, and what to expect in the second Trump term

Prepared by Arielle Kuperberg for the Council on Contemporary Families symposium Policies Affecting Families: What We Know, and What to Expect in the Second Trump Term

Immigration. Abortion. Anti-Trans laws. Student debt. Reversing the falling fertility rate. All these topics have been the subject of intense debates in the past several years, and some have been the subject of executive orders and new actions by the Trump administration in his first 50 days in office. In this symposium, the Council on Contemporary Families brings together leading experts on these topics to discuss how these policies affect families, and what to expect in the second Trump administration.

One concern of the new administration is the low fertility rate in the United States, with women having an average of 1.62 children in 2023, a historic low that is far below the “replacement” level of 2.1 children per woman that is necessary for stable population levels. In Vice President Vance’s first public address in office, he focused on the falling fertility rate, saying “It is the task of our government to make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids, to bring them into the world and to welcome them as the blessings that they are.”

As Daniel L. Carlson, Vivekananda Das, and Cole Grevelink discuss in their brief report for this symposium, one important reason for the fertility rate decline is the growing unaffordability of having children. They discuss policies designed to make child raising easier, analyzing possible changes to the Child Tax Credit system proposed in a bill recently introduced in congress by a Republican congressman. As Carlson and colleagues find, all families with children would see an increase in child tax credits under the proposed system. The biggest increases would go to wealthy families and families with stay-at-home parents (who are less likely to benefit from current policies). However, lower income families would also see a larger percent of their income returned to them, and those in lower cost states would also see a greater benefit. Yet Carlson and colleagues conclude that it is doubtful that such changes to policy would substantially increase the country’s fertility rates.

Another way to tackle falling fertility may be to reduce other costs to families. In their symposium report, student debt experts Arielle Kuperberg, Daniel Collier, Joan Maya Mazelis, and Fenaba Addo discuss their research, which finds that student debt is reducing marriage and childbearing rates. The loan pause first enacted by the Trump administration during the COVID pandemic provides further evidence of how loan debt affects families. Kuperberg and colleagues find that many responded to the loan pause by using the money from paused loan payments to pay for weddings, childbearing expenses, home purchases, and spending more on their children. But when the pause ended, some moved back home with their parents, and one in five parents pulled their children out of extracurricular activities. The evidence suggests that student loan debt restricts the ability of young adults to provide the type of life they want to provide for children – so some are having fewer children, or not having children at all.

Abortion restrictions may also be viewed as a policy to increase fertility rates – but in a symposium piece by Alicia Walker, she finds that restricting abortion does not decrease abortion rates. In fact, abortion rates have increased in the U.S. since many states began restricting abortion in the past 3 years. However, what does increase with abortion restrictions are the risks associated with abortion. Confusion over local abortion laws has led to deaths after women experiencing miscarriages or other pregnancy complications have been denied care.

Abortion restrictions can have disproportionate effects on undocumented immigrants, as Sameera Nayak discusses in her symposium report. Immigrant women are more likely to have low incomes, and are less likely to have access to health insurance and health care, making it harder for them to access abortions, especially if they need to travel to obtain one. They may also face detention and deportation while seeking abortion care. And many of the states that have restricted access to abortion are the same states that have especially restrictive policies when it comes to immigration. Some states are also now attempting to reclassify abortion as homicide – and recently Florida passed laws mandating the death penalty for undocumented immigrants who are convicted of homicide. These conditions combine to make immigrant women especially vulnerable when abortion restrictions are passed.

Speaking of immigration, reform to immigration is another major platform of the Trump administration, and has already been the subject of executive orders and deportation campaigns. Immigration expert Bethany Letiecq discusses the history of U.S. immigration policy, and some of the actions on immigration that the Trump administration has already taken. She discusses her research during the first Trump administration on Central American mothers living as undocumented immigrants in the United States, finding that half experienced depression and 80% were worried about deportation and family separation. Mothers who experienced their romantic partners’ deportations lost housing, experienced food insecurity, and had an accumulation of other hardships. These experiences are likely to become more widespread as the United States faces what Letiecq calls “the most significant anti-immigrant movement in decades.”

Finally, Gina May and Barbara J. Risman discuss the growing split in states between those restricting LGBTQIA+ rights and those protecting them. Over half of states have banned trans youth in sports, half have restricted gender-affirming care for minors, and some restrict bathroom use or even pronoun use. On the other side, over twenty states now allow the “x” category to be used for nonbinary people on identification documents, almost half restrict employment discrimination or discrimination in public accommodations based on gender and sexual orientation, half restrict housing discrimination, and twenty-two states restrict education discrimination. These differences are evidence of a growing split between states when it comes to gender identity and sexual orientation protections – or restrictions.

Time will tell how these policies will play out, and what further policy changes will be made in the current administration. And some of these policies may have counteracting effects; for instance immigrant women tend to have more children than American-born women, so efforts to reduce immigration may counteract any successful efforts to increase the average fertility rate in the United States. But one thing is for sure – families have been and will continue to be affected by these policies, whether those effects are intended or not.

About the Author

Arielle Kuperberg is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Sociology, Anthropology and Public Health Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Co-Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. She can be reached at akuperbe@umbc.edu. Follow her on X at @ATKuperberg or on Bluesky at @ariellekuperberg.bsky.social.

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