Why doesn't Gen Z want children? | Hacker News Reader

Why doesn't Gen Z want children?

unherd.com

7 pointsjseliger21 comments

I ponder this question myself on the edge of Gen Z and my life is simplified tremendously if I just essentially pause it in high earning young person mode.

Money is abundant for travel and anything I want. I don't need to figure out dating. Means I don't need to figure out everything from conflict resolution to clothing. I don't need to struggle to buy a ton of housing. I have friends/a sister who will have kids I can just play rich uncle to. I can retire decades early due to overemployment and spend an absurd amount of money every year doing whatever I want.

The Peter Pan life has a lot going for it.

One day you'll be having a conversion with someone who obviously does have kids and when they finally come up for breath whilst telling you all about them, they'll ask if you have kids too.

Be prepared for an odd reaction when you say no, like you just admitted to having a contagious ailment, or something equally unpleasant.

Be further prepared for these kinds of conversations to become very common as you get older too.

I mean, GP could just say "I'm LGBT" and shut down the thing you're referring to (or at least, make it imprudent for a coworker to discriminate on that basis)

you can say, "due to personal reasons" or "i cant have kids" or "my partner cant have kids" or "we keep trying but keep having miscarriages" or you can just say you dont want to, and stop caring so much what other people think.

What about your paternal instincts/need to progenate?

I'm gen z as well and I definitely want to be a father one day because to me, it is instinctual - something I need to do for fulfilment.

Monetary hurdles (and a terrible online dating environment) doesn't help of course and I'm assuming most people in my generation are in the same boat.

My sex drive so far has not been sufficient for me to ever date anyone, so parenthood is more of an intellectual/emotional closeness/personal project interest.

The instinct exists, but has never caused me to do anything about it before.

Because they can barely afford to live on their own with room mates. Housing has gone up 5x what wages have in the past 10 years. College tuition has gone up 10x meaning that Gen Z can expect to be paying on over $100,000 in student loans.

We pay people peanuts and act surprised when they don't pump out more babies to be wage slaves for us.

It's a multi-faceted issue. One of which is raw cost (the cash required to birth and raise a child). Another is opportunity cost: even if you have the money for a child, taking time off to raise it is ruinous to your career (usually women's careers). If you decide to leave your job to take care of a child, it takes YEARS to get back to your income level or career stage, if you ever do.

Women who have a dream career they went to school and studied for essentially are being forced to choose between career and motherhood. In modern society, choosing to abandon your career and raise children is seen as anti-feminist; like your efforts up to this point have been for nothing.

But the article chooses to focus on a third explanation, which is delayed adulthood, in which Gen Z are achieving typical adult milestones at later ages (driving a car, having sex, getting married, moving out, having children). Gen Z has the longest adolescence of any generation thus far.

Anecdotally, most Gen Z I interact with seem completely helpless. They rely on their parents for everything. They can't drive a car, they don't get summer jobs, and they can't seem to figure out any of their own problems. One neighbor has a 20 year old son who mistakenly took an Uber to work on one of his days off (thinking he was supposed to work that day). When he learned of his mistake, he called his mom (who lives 45mins away by car, and was at the time disabled due to a knee injury) and asked her to drive him back to his apartment (which was maybe 10mins away by car from where he worked), rather than figuring it out for himself

The reason for delayed adulthood is because Millenial parents cannot afford to help their kids reach those milestones. They cannot afford insurance for a teenage driver, an additional car, to live in a walkable area, or help their kid pay rent on an apartment. Gen Z cannot afford housing, cars, utilities, or college.

Gen Z is the next victim of wage suppression, cuts to social safety nets, as well as ballooning education and housing costs.

I have seen Gen Z who have access to a parents car, whose parents are incentivizing their kids to get a drivers license, who still refuse to learn to drive because their parents can be relied upon to drive them everywhere. I get that there are economic circumstances that make it hard to leave home, but there also seems to be no desire for independence whatsoever. Even gen Z coworkers of mine who make great software engineering money choose to live at home with their parents

> but there also seems to be no desire for independence whatsoever.

What did independence mean for you at our age? For us, it just means burdens. I was also slow to get my drivers license and compared with my Dad why everyone our age took forever to get it while his generation rushed out to do it.

For him it meant the freedom to go places and visit friends. For us, we go very few places and virtually all those places are places our parents demand that we go (like school). I spent time with friends outside of school maybe once a year as everyone was so busy.

> Even gen Z coworkers of mine who make great software engineering money choose to live at home with their parents

I am one of them and I have multiple software engineering jobs. The big reason there is that by simply waiting and piling up cash, life gets ever easier. Plus, it is convenient, comfortable, and easy.

I will inevitably be independent one day, but why not wait for the best possible position for that so it is less of a burden?

Independence meant living deliberately. You may encounter hardship, but it will be because of your own choices. Rather than living a life of comfort in which you have no real choice over the direction of your life, you choose your own path and sometimes that means discomfort. But to live without occasional discomfort is to not live at all.

> why not wait for the best possible position for that so it is less of a burden

Because it seems like you're putting off on living your life and remaining a child well into your mid-late 20s. There has to be some point in life which makes slight hardship tolerable other than accumulating wealth and living a life of hedonism and decadence. By failing to become independent as early as you can, you turn into a lame person

I went to a rich high school and we didn't exactly get our licences early either. The reason was that having one offered no benefits. Our parents came with us to activities anyway and what else would we do with it?

A licence didn't mean freedom, which is what many older people here said it meant to them. It just meant we did the driving instead of Mom sometimes to go to the same place.

Why don't you go places without your parents? Independence for me meant not having my parents around

It's not that. How do I know? Because in many countries all over the world people are generally getting richer with each generation (including my own country), and yet they have fewer and fewer kids.

I'm just telling you based on my experience. All of the Gen Z folks I know are avoiding having children because they know it would financially ruin them.

I think part of the problem is that in many of these countries you basically have to be “rich” to get by, and you need a lot of money to raise kids according to the standards in these countries.

The reason it used to be easier to have kids is that the whole society was based around having/raising kids being the mothers full time job. The living expenses in richer countries are generally so high that this is no longer viable. Even in Norway, which is very rich and where there’s a ridiculous amount of financial support for having children, if a woman decides to make it her life’s job to just have lots of kids, and the father just has a normal job, you’re going to have a pretty hard time and a terrible pension.

In a poorer time, or a poorer country, you didn’t need to own expensive stuff to have kids. In many rich countries it’s basically impossible to have a family without a car, and since laws in some of them require huge booster seats for kids, you need a huge car. When my mom was a kid you could just throw the kids in the backseat without even a seatbelt.

To be clear, I think we’re moving in the right direction in most ways. Requiring booster seats is good. Most women having a career outside of having kids is very good. It’s just that we don’t have all the pieces in place. Even Northern European countries have maybe 50% of the financial and practical support needed to motivate people to having more kids in a modern rich society.

My benchmark is that if a woman wants to have like 10 kids, she should end up with a decent salary and decent pension in the end. Doing that is almost a full life’s work, and it should pay fairly to choose to do it (it is a job that needs to be done for society to survive after all, especially if most women only have time/resources for 1-2 kids, if any, if the want a decent career)

Because their kids will be growing up in a world where the place they live in is either underwater or on fire.

I want kids but my wife doesn't

You may need to find a new wife.

I mostly think of marriage as a framework for having children and even today question marriage if no children are part of the plans. But marriage also is a terrific companionship and sharing of one's benefits/burdens.

Gay marriage has generalized the concept somewhat, extending marriage as far as sharing of benefits, since marriage in the USA provides a means to pass Social Security benefits to a spouse (even after death).

I want kids but its not a dealbreaker

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