Make Babies Great Again – Washington Examiner

President-elect Donald Trump has five children of his own, and his vice president is a young father of three who was often seen as an active parent even during his campaign.

The future co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, has fathered a cool dozen children; Trump’s pick for Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has nine children with his wife Rachel; and Trump’s nominees for secretaries of Defense, Health and Human Services, Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are both fathers of seven children. Trump’s nominees for secretary of state (Senator Marco Rubio) and CIA director (Mark Ratcliff) are fathers of four, and nominees for the Interior Department (North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum) and Homeland Security Department (South Dakota Governor). , Kristi Noem), and the national security advisor (Mike Waltz) each have three children.

What happens now that Trump is the president-elect?

The decision to bring children into the world is the ultimate expression of hope and optimism for the future. If you believe the world is ending and future generations will face misery, you are not interested in making children suffer. The incoming administration is filled with individuals who have a strong interest in making America and the world as great as possible. Nothing is as motivating as your own children.

You’d be hard-pressed to find two people who have demonstrated a deeper understanding or concern about declining birthrates than Musk and Vice President-elect JD Vance, and it’s not just talk; You personally valued being part of the solution.

But in their respective roles, solving the birth crisis is unlikely to be high on the agenda. Just as Trump created a new role for the joint leadership of Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, a specialized czar must also be created to address declining birth rates.

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What would a pronatalist policy look like on a practical level? With the growth of big government, many conservatives are concerned that solving the problem would be a road to hell fraught with good intentions. Without expanding government programs, there are opportunities for the new Trump administration to change course on the birth crisis.

Recently, in response to a report about record low birth rates in Sweden and the UK, Musk tweeted: “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness.”

This is exactly where you start. We need to change the messaging around children and birth to one that we can control, starting in schools; We can’t just teach how to avoid pregnancy in school health classes. Negative messages about pregnancy and motherhood are used as a weapon to deter teens from becoming pregnant, but these negative feelings persist long past the teenage years.

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Research has shown that public information campaigns in East Asia for population control have been effective – too effective. Daniel Hess advocated for pro-natalist advertising campaigns that would increase the importance of motherhood on his X account @MoreBirths. He wrote, “Parents crave status and validation for their efforts more than money.” And leaders can do this by celebrating parents at every opportunity.”

We already have the stars of these campaigns for right-wing Americans in government. Celebrities like James Vanderbeek (six children) and Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds (four children) could star in commercials similar to the wildly popular film “Got Milk?” ’90s campaigns that made milk sexy and attractive.

Led by a single department, it’s time for a reassessment of government policies that make it harder to be a parent. From working with the Department of Transportation to develop regulations that ensure families with young children automatically sit together on planes to working with state lawmakers to make it easier to become a licensed child care provider, there is something for the Government ways to move without creating new entitlement programs. Washington Examiner Senior political columnist Timothy P. Carney wrote an entire book about what our society is like Family unfriendlyand his analysis is a blueprint for solving the problem.

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During his first term, Trump allowed parents to keep more of their own money by increasing child tax credits. Vice President Kamala Harris began promising to do the same during the campaign. From increasing these credits to allowing more child expenses to be deducted, there are countless ways to change the tax code to make parenting more affordable and attainable.

In fact, according to a recent poll, 75% of Americans believe we are on the wrong path. After World War II, in a sign of optimism, the country experienced an unprecedented baby boom (hence the generational nickname “Boomer”). We need a similar sense of optimism, and there is no more meaningful way to achieve this than by creating a second generation of baby boomers.

Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six and author. She is the bestselling co-author of Stolen youth.