The U.S. fertility rate hit a new record-low last year, continuing a persistent trend that will have significant consequences for American society.

The total fertility rate dropped to 1.62 births per woman last year, a 2 percent decline from the year before, according to newly released data from the Centers for Disease Control. The figure is below replacement level, meaning Americans are not having enough children to replace themselves, a development with major implications for the American economy.

On TikTok, where trends and sensations constantly come and go, Mike and Jeralyn Wirtz’s love story easily captivates viewers with every scroll and tap.

The couple began to share photos and videos of their life on TikTok to connect with their children and grandchildren during the pandemic. Now, users head to their page to watch their love story play out across various posts and videos, featuring old glossy printed photographs of their early days as a couple in the 70s to their lives throughout the decades as they welcomed children and took on new adventures. 

A few weeks ago, I got a panicked message from Jason Cohen, a dad in upstate New York. He told me that the day care where his twin toddlers had been happily ensconced for over a year, J.A.C.E. Daycare and Early Learning Center in Wappingers Falls, was closing unexpectedly and had given parents less than two weeks’ notice and no clear explanation. But Mid Hudson News reported that the center was “suffering extreme financial stress and defaulted on a major loan.”

The challenges facing families with young children are legion.

From affording the costly basics — like diapers, clothes and food — to the exhausting search for high-quality, reasonably priced child care, parents and caregivers have their hands full. And it's hard to imagine government, as polarized as it is, agreeing on anything that might help.

And yet. A new report suggests there are bold moves that folks across the political spectrum can agree on.

A New Jersey couple welcomed healthy twin boys born on different days and different years before and after the stroke of midnight on New Year’s.

Proud mom Eve Humphrey, of Merchantville, gave birth to Ezra and Ezekiel Humphrey at Virtua Voorhees Hospital in Voorhees less than an hour apart on Dec. 31, 2023, and Jan. 1, 2024, respectively.

The boys’ father, Billy Humphrey, who turned 36 on Sunday, told “Good Morning America” that it was a birthday to remember.

“I was very excited [about] the potential of having my boys on my birthday,” the father said.

On a summer’s day, TikTok influencer Gwen The Milkmaid can be found frying up all-American comfort food dressed in a floral prairie dress. “I don’t want to be a boss babe. I want to be a frolicking mama. I want to spend my days baking bread, cuddling chickens, and drinking raw milk straight from the udder,” she writes in her TikTok caption. In another video, she smiles beatifically at her nearly 50,000 followers, giving the camera a view of her ample breasts as she bakes a fresh sourdough loaf.

Millions of families are at risk of losing child care after this weekend when emergency funding allocated to providers during the coronavirus pandemic expires. Congress faces a Saturday deadline to act before the $24 billion Child Care Stabilization Program ends, putting thousands of day care centers, preschools and other child care centers in jeopardy.

Whether children were breastfed as infants and for how long may have an impact on their test scores when they are adolescents, according to new research.

The report, published Monday in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, followed about 5,000 British children from their infancy in the early 2000s to their last year of high school, according to lead study author Dr. Reneé Pereyra-Elías, a doctoral student and researcher in the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford.

Roughly 24 million, or one-third of all American children under age 18, are living with an unmarried parent, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center analysis of US Census Bureau data. And 81% of those single parent homes are headed by a mom.

This has been a growing trend since the late 1960s. The number of kids being raised by mostly single moms has more than doubled between 1968 and 2017.

The government on Friday announced a policy draft of what Prime Minister Fumio Kishida calls “unprecedented steps” to reverse Japan’s declining birthrate, including beefing up child care allowances and expanding scholarships for college education.

The proposals, announced by Masanobu Ogura, the minister in charge of policies for children, also include systems that improve child care services, encourage co-parenting and support single parents.