Kieran Culkin doesn’t want to be ‘Home Alone’ and neither should we

“Let’s get cracking on those kids!”—During his Oscar speech, Kieran Culkin, brother of Macaulay Culkin, revealed that his wife agreed to have another child if Kieran won an Oscar. (ncregister.com/blog/kieran-culkin-oscars-speech)

Kieran Culkin, who had a small part in his brother Macaulay Culkin’s popular film, “Home Alone,” just won an Oscar for his role in “A Real Pain.” While receiving the Oscar at the 2025 awards ceremony, Kieran spoke about the “baby pact” he made with his wife, Jazz.

A few years ago, Kieran shared with his wife that he wanted four children. Jazz had playfully retorted, “I will give you four when you win an Oscar.” He held out his hand, and they shook on it.

On stage with the Oscar in his hand, Kieran spoke directly to his wife: “I have not brought it up once until just now . . . You remember that, honey? You do? Then I just have this to say to you, Jazz, love of my life, ye of little faith. No pressure. I love you. I’m really sorry I did this again (winning an award for acting). And let’s get cracking on those kids. What do you say? I love you!” Jazz and the star-studded Oscar audience cheered and laughed, receiving the challenge to have more kids with joy and enthusiasm.

Kieran has Catholic roots but apparently doesn’t speak much about it publicly. National Catholic Register reporter Alyssa Murphy writes, “Although his faith doesn’t seem to be shared much in recent interviews, Culkin also shared, during his Emmy win last year for his role in HBO’s ‘Succession,’ that his co-star Sarah Snook is a godmother to his son. How refreshing to have a successful and talented young actor share not only the love he has for his wife of 12 years, but his earnest desire to bring more babies into this world.”

For a myriad of reasons, both social and political, many nations have falling fertility rates.

In his book Get Married, Catholic sociologist Brad Wilcox writes, “The number of empty cradles across the land is growing. After a sharp decline in the 1970s, the total fertility rate hovered at around 2.1 children per woman until 2009—the replacement level needed to keep our population size relatively constant (without immigration).

However, the fertility rate has fallen well below replacement level since the Great Recession, and COVID has pushed it even lower. The U.S. birth rate fell to 1.6 children in 2020, a record-setting low. About one-third of American women ages forty to forty-five have either no children (17 percent) or just one child (18 percent). In 1976, that rate was 20 percent, when 10 percent of women at this age had never given birth and 10 percent had one child. The birth rate has never been so low in America.”

Countries like Japan are struggling even more with a rate of 1.26. Wilcox reports that this is having a huge effect on the men of Japan.

Wilcox interviewed Ano Matsui, who said, “There are a lot of men like me who find women scary.” “More than 60 percent of unmarried young adults (in Japan) say they have no relationship with a member of the opposite sex, and the rates of the never-married young men and woman in the island nation keep climbing.” 

Wilcox says in the preface of his book, “In writing Get Married, my aim is not to argue that everyone should put a ring on it. Not everyone can or should marry...but for most of us, getting married and forging a strong family life is the best way to build a prosperous, meaningful and happy life—and a way that needs a lot more guidance and support from the culture and law than it is now garnering.”

I wholeheartedly agree with Wilcox’s assessment and encourage readers to pick up his book for a deep dive into this question.

Holy Scripture proclaims a fundamental truth about the human race. Male and female are made in the image and likeness of God and are called to ‘be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue it and rule (Gen 1:27-28). These truths are exposited beautifully in Pope St. John Paul’s magnum opus, The Theology of the Body, a series of Wednesday audiences in the early 1980s, which have radically changed the way we in the Church talk about men, women, and life. Studying the truths of the theology of the body should speak to the heart of each person made in the image and likeness of God. Knowing that each person who is conceived and born into the world as an ‘image of God’ is a powerful truth—a truth that seems to have caught the attention of Culkin and his wife.

Pondering the ideas of Pope St. John Paul II, as well as those of Wilcox and even Culkin, makes me reconsider the great Catholic teachings concerning our creation and its goodness, the current socio-political realities of a world that seems to be anti-marriage and anti-child, and the Hollywood actor who appears to be breaking the mold of a typical celebrity.

We might ask: Are we seeing the start of the social pendulum swinging back to become more pro-marriage, pro-family and pro-life? Is Culkin’s thank you speech a sign of this change?

I am certain the way out of the current marriage and fertility decline is that we must stop the direction in which we are going, turn around, and go the other way. Being pro-marriage and pro-life is counterculture, and the challenges are real, but each of us needs to take a stand like Culkin and do something.

Borrowing from Culkin’s words, who clearly doesn’t want to be home alone, I say with him: Let’s get cracking!