For decades, the prevailing wisdom for young women in America seemed almost set in stone: Build your career in your 20s, establish yourself professionally, and only then consider starting a family. This approach, as reported by Dow Jones & Company, has helped women break into higher-earning positions and even fields once dominated by men. The data backs it up—women in their prime working years are participating in the workforce at record highs as of 2025. And, as a result, women are having babies later in life, if at all, with egg freezing often touted as the solution to fertility constraints that come with age.
Yet, a new current is sweeping through a segment of young women, especially among conservatives, who are flipping this script. They’re choosing to prioritize marriage and children earlier in life, confident that career advancement can follow. For them, life is a series of "seasons"—a concept borrowed from the biblical passage Ecclesiastes 3:1: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”
Isabel Brown, a 28-year-old conservative activist, is among those leading the way. Brown married in 2024 and welcomed her first child in 2025, all while building her career as a podcast host for the conservative media company the Daily Wire and speaking on college campuses for Turning Point, the youth organization co-founded by Charlie Kirk. “Young people are realizing that our lives are going to be so much more meaningful if we have a family to share our success with from the start,” Brown told The Wall Street Journal. She often addresses her roughly two million followers on Instagram and TikTok, encouraging them to reconsider the notion that early marriage and parenthood limit personal freedom. “It’s not true that walking down the aisle or welcoming a child into the world will somehow limit your personal freedom,” she said.
This message is resonating with a growing number of young conservative women. In October 2025, about 100 women aged 18 to 22 gathered in Scottsdale, Arizona, for a conference hosted by the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women. Speaker after speaker—including Brown—urged attendees to pursue careers and education, but not to let that ambition come at the expense of marriage and children. Reagan Conrad, host of “The Comments Section” podcast for the Daily Wire, even discouraged the increasingly common practice of egg freezing. “If we as women are putting our eggs on ice for a decade to make sure that our career is thriving,” Conrad said, “we have a prioritization problem.”
This attitude marks a distinct shift from the mainstream. According to an analysis by Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma, as recently as 15 years ago, self-identified conservative and liberal women between ages 18 and 35 were having children at roughly the same rate. But as of 2024, the gap has widened dramatically: about 75% of liberal women in this age range were childless, compared to only 40% of conservatives. “Liberals are leaning hard into being DINKs [Dual Income No Kids], being childless or having fewer kids, and it being very much a choice, whereas for conservatives having kids is still very much a part of what it means to be a whole person,” Perry explained to The Wall Street Journal.
Having children early doesn’t necessarily mean stepping away from the workforce entirely. Carrie Lukas, president of Independent Women, a right-leaning public policy group, emphasized that there’s still plenty of time to build a meaningful career after raising young children. “If you decide to not work or not lean in in the first 10 years of being a mom and you do that in your 20s, there’s still plenty of time to start working in your 30s and have a meaningful career,” Lukas said.
Kimberly Begg, who took the helm as president of the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women in 2024, has made changes to her organization to reflect these priorities. She shifted office hours to end at 2 p.m., allowing mothers to pick up their children from school and attend to family needs. “Children and marriages and families need more than just loving thoughts,” Begg said. “They need presence. And these hours allow me to be present with my children while I’m engaging in meaningful work.” Begg, who regrets prioritizing a travel-heavy job over her five young children earlier in her career, now encourages young women to seek the flexible work arrangements that have become more common since the pandemic—though she acknowledges these can come with trade-offs in terms of pay and advancement. “You can have everything you want,” Begg tells the students she mentors. “But you can’t have it all at once.”
For Grace De Mars, a 21-year-old senior at California Baptist University, the challenge is deeply personal. Recently engaged to her high school boyfriend, De Mars is weighing her aspiration to become a history teacher against her desire to start a family in her mid-20s. Her mother, who had her at 39, has warned her about the difficulties of late pregnancy. “I have to come to terms with what’s more important for our children and for our family,” De Mars said. “Especially as a teacher, it’s not like I can just clock out and go home and not take my work with me.”
Emma Waters, another voice in this movement, is living proof of the seasons approach. At 28, she works remotely as a policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation while raising two young children. Waters left a fast-paced, coalition-building role when she and her husband decided to have children, choosing to be home with them during the day. “I love my work, but my top priority is to raise my children, and that cannot be outsourced to someone else for eight hours a day, five days a week,” Waters said. She’s turned down enticing career opportunities to maintain that balance, and she’s clear-eyed about the fact that not every family can rely on a single income or remote work. In her policy work, Waters advocates for more financial support for married, working families, alongside the social support systems already in place for single-parent households. “The answer is more community support to find flexible work for young mothers,” Waters said.
Underlying this movement is a sense that the dominant cultural narrative—one that centers work as the primary source of fulfillment—isn’t delivering happiness. “We are looking around at the antifamily state of affairs in our country,” Brown said, “and realizing that, for the most part, people aren’t happy or fulfilled.” Her husband, Brock Belcher, who works in communications for the Trump administration, shares child-care responsibilities for their daughter Isla, “with the exception of breast-feeding,” Brown joked. She often brings Isla along to speaking engagements, showing that motherhood and professional ambition can coexist, even if not always at the same time or in the same way as previous generations imagined.
The idea of “seasons” is catching on, offering women a new framework—one that doesn’t force them to choose permanently between career and family, but instead encourages them to embrace different priorities at different times. As the debate continues, it’s clear that the choices young women make about work and family are as diverse as the women themselves—and that the cultural conversation is far from settled.
