The House of Family and Population stands as a distinctive voice in demographic and family research. While secular population centers treat fertility decline as a technical puzzle to be managed, we ask deeper questions: What does it mean that advanced societies are choosing not to have children? What has been lost when contraception severed the connection between sexual intimacy and procreation? How do different family structures affect child wellbeing and the integrity of family life?

This house is known for both pathbreaking qualitative work — such as the acclaimed ethnographic study Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth (Regnery 2024), which explored why highly educated women choose large families — and rigorous quantitative analysis of fertility trends, household economics, and family structure outcomes. We believe understanding family life requires multiple methods: statistical modeling and cohort analysis alongside interviews and participant observation, economic theory alongside theological reflection on marriage and natality.

Our work is sober about the problems but unapologetically optimistic about renewal, rooted in Catholic teaching about the dignity of human life and the goods of marriage. But we pursue these questions with scholarly rigor that earns respect across ideological lines.