Conservative Young Women Flip the Script: Kids First, Then Career
‘Seasons’ is the new buzzword for those starting a family earlier in life and focusing on professional advancement later.
5 min
For generations of women, the logic has seemed airtight: Focus on a career in your 20s, and worry about starting a family once you are established in a job.
This mindset has catapulted women into higher-earning positions, and into traditionally male-dominated fields.
The share of women in their prime working years who are in the workforce is around a record high. And women are having babies later, if they have them at all. The answer to fertility constraints, they’re told, is egg freezing.
Isabel Brown , 28, didn’t want to wait. She married last year and had a baby this year. She’s now building her career as a conservative activist, hosting a podcast for conservative media company the Daily Wire and speaking on college campuses as a representative for Turning Point, the youth organisation Charlie Kirk co-founded.
Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk , now leads the organisation and is amplifying a message especially resonant for young conservative women: Family is central. Children come first.
“Young people are realising 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 said. She and other conservative women talk about timing family and work as “seasons” of life.
The term is from the biblical passage Ecclesiastes 3:1: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”
Many of the women who view their lives in this way say they think of themselves as existing in between the extremes of tradwives (who treat caring for their homes and families as a more permanent, full-time job) and girlbosses (who centre their lives around work).
As recently as 15 years ago, self-described conservative and liberal women between the ages of 18 and 35 were having children at around the same rate, according to an analysis from a large national study called the General Social Survey by Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma.
But in recent years, the gap has widened, his analysis shows. As of 2024, roughly 75% of liberal women in this age range were childless, compared with around 40% of conservatives. In 2010, the difference was only 5 percentage points.
“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 said.
Having kids doesn’t preclude workforce participation, and plenty of liberals are still putting a priority on parenthood. But as birth and marriage rates fall, some conservatives are doubling down on the importance of starting a family.
“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,” said Carrie Lukas , the president of Independent Women, a right-leaning public policy organisation focused on women’s economic issues.
At a conference for conservative college women in Scottsdale, Ariz., last month, speaker after speaker (including Brown) encouraged the 100 gathered women ages 18 to 22 to pursue careers and education—but not at the expense of marriage and children.
Reagan Conrad, who hosts “The Comments Section” podcast for the Daily Wire, discouraged egg freezing. “If we as women are putting our eggs on ice for a decade to make sure that our career is thriving,” she said, “we have a prioritisation problem.”
K.T. McFarland talked about leaving her job in public affairs at the Pentagon at 34 to raise five kids and deciding to return to the workforce after 9/11, when she was 50. The former Fox News analyst served as President Trump’s deputy national security adviser in his first term.
Kimberly Begg , president of the nonprofit Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women, which was hosting the event, told the audience that Gen Z is the “loneliest generation” because members of that demographic group are a part of smaller and more fractured families.
Begg also said that they have been told lies such as “faith and family hold you back.”
The 49-year-old says she regrets putting her travel-heavy job as general counsel of a nonprofit over the needs of her five young kids earlier in her career.
“One of my daughters learned how to use the phone and she called me constantly because she wanted me to come home,” Begg said in an interview after the conference. “My children were not thriving.”
She decided to quit that role after seeing how the big-eyed Beanie Babies she brought home as souvenirs for her daughter after each work trip had taken over her room.
After five years at home, during which time she wrote two nonfiction books and advised nonprofits, Begg joined the Luce Center in 2024.
A few months after she became president, she shifted the in-person office hours—which they call “collaboration hours”—to end at 2 p.m. to accommodate mothers picking their kids up from school and other family priorities.
“Children and marriages and families need more than just loving thoughts,” said Begg. “They need presence. And these hours allow me to be present with my children while I’m engaging in meaningful work.”
She encourages the students she mentors to look for the flexible work arrangements that have become more common postpandemic. (Though they can come with drawbacks for career advancement and pay.)
“You can have everything you want,” Begg says. “But you can’t have it all at once.”
Grace De Mars , a 21-year-old senior at California Baptist University who attended the conference, recently got engaged to her high school boyfriend.
She has been trying to reconcile her aspirations to become a history teacher with her desire to start a family in her mid-20s. Her mother, who had her at 39, warned her about how much harder that late pregnancy was than her previous three.
“I have to come to terms with what’s more important for our children and for our family,” said De Mars. “Especially as a teacher, it’s not like I can just clock out and go home and not take my work with me.”
As a young mother and policy analyst working remotely for conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, 28-year-old Emma Waters is both living and researching the seasons approach.
She left a fast-paced, coalition-building role when she and her husband decided to have children so that she could be home with them—now ages 2½ and 11 months—during the day. Since then, she says she’s turned down other in-person career opportunities she would have otherwise enjoyed.
“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,” said Waters. “The ‘you can have it all’ mindset is so misleading and sets women up for disappointment.”
She knows that not every woman can work remotely, and that living on a single salary isn’t an option for many families. She also doesn’t prescribe her family’s approach as a singular ideal, acknowledging that seasons look different for everyone.
In her work as a policy analyst, she is advocating for “more financial support for married, working families in particular alongside the social support systems we have in place for single-parent families already.”
Mostly, however, she thinks it is the culture that needs to change to make it easier for people to fit their work around their families, rather than the other way around.
“The answer is more community support to find flexible work for young mothers,” Waters said.
In posts to her roughly 2 million mostly young Instagram and TikTok followers, Turning Point representative Brown asks: Why wait for marriage and parenthood? “It’s not true that walking down the aisle or welcoming a child into the world will somehow limit your personal freedom,” she said.
Brown records her show for the Daily Wire from her house in Washington, D.C., and often brings her daughter to the speaking engagements she travels to all over the country.
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.
Their experience as a young family, Brown said, differs from the message she thinks a lot of young people see about how they should structure their lives.
“We are looking around at the antifamily state of affairs in our country,” Brown said, “and realising that, for the most part, people aren’t happy or fulfilled.”
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At least for people who carry the APOE4 genetic variant, a juicy steak could keep the brain healthy.
3 min
Must even steak be politicised? The American Heart Association recently recommended eating more “plant-based” protein in a move to counter the Health and Human Services Department’s new guidelines calling for more red meat.
Few would argue that eating a Big Mac a day is good for you.
On the other hand, growing evidence, including a study last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that eating more meat—particularly unprocessed red meat—can reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s in the quarter or so of people with a particular genetic predisposition.
The APOE4 gene variant is one of the biggest risk factors for Alzheimer’s.
You inherit one copy of the APOE gene from each parent. The most common variant is APOE3; the least is APOE2.
The latter carries a lower risk of Alzheimer’s, while the former is neutral. A quarter of people carry one copy of the APOE4 variant, and about 2% carry two.
APOE4 is more common among people with Northern European and African ancestry. In Europe the variant increases with latitude, and is present in as many as 27% of people in northern countries versus 4% in southern ones. God smiled on the Italians and Greeks.
For unknown reasons, the APOE4 variant increases the risk of Alzheimer’s far more for women than men.
Women’s risk multiplies roughly fourfold if they have one copy and tenfold if they have two. Men with a single copy show little if any higher risk, while those with two face four times the risk.
What makes APOE4 so pernicious? Scientists don’t know exactly, but the variant is also associated with higher cholesterol levels—even among thin people who eat healthily.
Scientists have found that cholesterol builds up in brain cells of APOE4 carriers, which can disrupt communications between neurons and generate amyloid plaque, an Alzheimer’s hallmark.
The Heart Association’s recommendation to eat less red meat may be sound advice for people with high cholesterol caused by indulgent diets.
But a diet high in red meat may be better for the brains of APOE4 carriers.
In the JAMA study, researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute examined how diet, particularly meat consumption, affects dementia risk among seniors with the different APOE variants.
Higher consumption of meat, especially unprocessed red meat, was associated with significantly lower dementia risk for APOE4 carriers.
APOE4 carriers who consumed the most meat—the equivalent of 4.5 ounces a day—were no more likely to develop dementia than noncarriers. (
The study controlled for other variables that are known to affect Alzheimer’s risk including sex, age, physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption and education.)
APOE4 carriers who ate the most unprocessed meat were at significantly lower risk of dying over the study’s 15-year period and had lower cholesterol than carriers who ate less. Go figure. Noncarriers, however, didn’tenjoy similar benefits from eating more red meat.
The study’s findings are consistent with two large U.K. studies.
One found that each additional 50 grams of red meat (equivalent to half a hamburger patty) that an APOE4 carrier consumed each day was associated with a 36% reduced risk of dementia.
The other found that older women who carried the APOE4 variant and consumed at least one serving a day of unprocessed red meat had a cognitive advantage over carriers who ate less than half a serving, and that this advantage was of roughly equal magnitude to the cognitive disadvantage observed among APOE4 carriers in general.
In all three studies, eating more red meat appeared to negate the increased genetic risk of APOE4.
Perhaps one reason men with the variant are at lower Alzheimer’s risk than women is that men eat more red meat.
These findings might cause chagrin to women who rag their husbands about ordering the rib-eye instead of the heart-healthy salmon.
But remember, the cognitive benefits of eating more red meat appear isolated to APOE4 carriers.
Nutrition is complicated, and categorical recommendations—other than perhaps to avoid nutritionally devoid foods—would best be avoided by governments and health bodies.
Readers can order an at-home test from any number of companies to screen for the APOE4 variant.
The Swedish researchers hypothesize that APOE4 carriers may be evolutionarily adapted to carnivorous diets, since the variant is believed to have emerged between one million and six million years ago during a “hypercarnivorous” period in human history.
The other two APOE variants originated more recently, during eras when humans ate more plants.
APOE4 carriers may absorb more nutrients from meat than plants, the researchers surmise. Vitamin B12—low levels have been associated with cognitive decline—isn’t naturally present in plant-based foods but is abundant in red meat.
Foods high in phytates (such as grains and beans) can interfere with absorption of zinc and iron (also high in red meat), which naturally declines with age. So maybe don’t chuck your steak yet.
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