America Needs More Famous Families

What do Pope Leo XIV and Billie Eilish have in common?

Neither have kids, and both were spontaneously named by numerous people in a recent survey as the person they most admired in the world. Among that set of popular celebrities, their admirers had some of the lowest desired family sizes: 2.04 kids for Pope Leo’s fans, 2.1 for Eilish’s. At the opposite end of the spectrum, superfans of Cardi B (4 kids), Tom Brady (3 kids), Michael Jordan (5 kids), and Chris Brown (3 kids) topped the list for desired family size, with all their fans wanting 3.2 or more children.

The small family sizes for the pope’s fans may be a misleading number; some of the people who named him as their favorite public figure might be Catholic clergy, committed to celibacy. When we add a range of demographic controls to adjust for this effect, the Pope Leo Fanclub’s adjusted desired family size rises to 2.18, while Eilish’s falls to 1.72, the lowest of any celebrity we studied.

Those sound like two cherry-picked examples. They aren’t. For the Institute for Family Studies’ 2026 State of Fertility report, my colleagues and I surveyed more than 4,700 Americans about the texture of their social and cultural lives, and one finding jumped off the page. We asked every respondent to name the public figure they most admired, then matched that figure to the number of children they were publicly known to have, as well as other demographic traits. The result: Each additional child borne by someone’s most-admired celebrity was associated with larger family-size desires for the fan, about as strong an association as the number of siblings that person grew up with.

For women, the celebrity effect was larger and more statistically reliable. The effect of being a fan of a big-family celebrity on desired family size was nearly as large as the effect of being a regular churchgoing person, and I think we can safely assume the median Cardi B superfan is not the median churchgoer.

These aren’t small effects, and they appear in a country where the birth rate is below 1.6 children and falling. It’s high time we got serious about asking what exactly it is about modern culture that leads to such low birth rates. It’s not just simple economics: Religious people have far more kids than non-religious yet work in the same economy. While pro-natal policies that give cash to parents do boost births a bit, the overall effect has been a bit underwhelming. It’s time to take a good look at our culture, and culture, in a country like ours, is set at the top. It is set by the famous across various dimensions of society.

There are exceptions to the celebrity effect, of course. NBA YoungBoy and Elon Musk both have around dozen acknowledged children, yet their fans have below-average desired family sizes: around 2.2-2.3 children in both cases (and Elon’s under-30 fans only desire about one child on average).

In both cases, those are men who had children with many women, which might undermine the influence of their big families on their fans. Most people don’t just want offspring; they want a family, a spouse who loves them, children around them, and a home full of memories. Thus, it’s not just celebrities who have many children who may shape fertility desires, but celebrities who have compelling family lives for fans to emulate.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has watched a teenage girl reorganize her wardrobe around a pop star or a young man pick up lifting because an athlete made it look like the point of being alive. We are imitative creatures. We always have been. We rehearse adulthood by copying the adults we find magnetic. Nowadays, the adults many people find most magnetic, the ones whose lives fit into our pockets for hours a day, are, disproportionately, people whose brand is built on everything except raising children.

This is not a knock on any individual star. It’s a description of an incentive structure. In some cases, it’s explicit: K-Pop stars are often required by their contracts to remain single and childless, and if by chance they do start a family, their fans often turn on them. They exist to be accessible heartthrobs, not real people.

Fame in 2026 rewards availability, mobility, reinvention, and the appearance of perpetual youth. It requires a carefully cultivated and sustained personal brand meant to capture a devoted audience, not just the highest number of eyeballs.

Unlike the celebrities we see on TV, parents have to set limits on their availability, and they often put down roots. And, well, let’s face it: It’s called “dad bod” for a reason.

Sure, a celebrity with one carefully managed child and a glam squad might read as aspirational, but a celebrity with five? Their kids are almost certainly not on screen, unless the celebrity deliberately puts them in the frame. In turn, the culture-shaping class in our society tends either to be childless or to present themselves as such to maintain their image. As we find in the data, the result is that their fans suppress their own fertility desires.

Not all hope is lost. The same cultural machinery that has talked us out of children can talk us back into them. We don’t need to lecture young people about their duty to the nation. Nobody has ever been nagged into wanting a baby. We need to make family life visible, attractive, and high-status again, and the fastest way to do that is through the people we already can’t stop watching. We need more famous families.

So how do you manufacture a more familistic celebrity culture? You can’t draft people into parenthood, and you shouldn’t try. But you can stop treating elite fertility as a private eccentricity and start treating it as a public good worth incentivizing. France already does a version of this: Its family quotient system hands its largest tax breaks to high-earning parents, on the theory that the people who set the tone for society should find children easy and rewarding rather than punishing. We could do the same: make it absurdly, conspicuously rewarding for the most influential Americans to have big families and let the cultural spillover do its work on the millions watching.

It is possible that paying Taylor Swift a billion dollars per kid (and maybe a billion more for a nice lullaby album) would do more for the American birth rate than spending that same billion on another round of child tax credits spread out, with a few bucks extra for each kid in America. I am not actually proposing we cut Taylor a check, but some math from our estimated effect sizes suggests that Taylor Swift having two kids could theoretically boost fertility for her cohort of fans by over 200,000 babies.

If we take the effect sizes from published studies of cash benefits as gospel, a billion dollars spent on baby bonuses for regular people would only get you about 40,000 extra babies. Subsidizing celebrities’ families might be a bad idea for a whole host of reasons (and probably no image-conscious celebrity would ever agree to take the money!), but the principle of the matter stands: Cultural interventions could be valuable ways to reverse the birth dearth.

Of course, family aspirations aren’t the same as family outcomes. We find that celebrity families have a big impact on the total number of children young people want to have; their effect on couples’ actual intentions to have more is smaller. It takes more than a glossy Instagram family to change what people actually do. Turning the desire for kids into the third kid in the car seat requires something else: friends who show up, neighbors who help, and a society that makes room for parents.

In the same study showing celebrity fertility effects, we found that individuals who had more supportive friends (i.e., whose friends would deliver them meals after a baby, celebrate with them, or babysit a child) not only wanted more kids, like the celebrity effect, but also actually intended to have more kids. Celebrities can help ripen the culture for family life, but supportive American communities remain indispensable to making families’ desires a reality.

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Lyman Stone is a senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from McGill University and is also director of research at the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence.

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