The Real Reason Gen Z Doesn’t Want Kids (It’s Not The Economy)

Vox published an article recently titled “Generation Dad,” profiling young men who say they want children, even as birth rates collapse and cultural elites insist family formation is passé. On its surface, the piece reads as cautiously optimistic. Despite economic anxiety, political polarization, and social fragmentation, young men still express a desire to become fathers. But beneath that optimism is a far more revealing contradiction, one that Vox gestures toward but never fully confronts. 

Gen Z is not afraid of the future. We are afraid of being the ones to create it. But a civilization that cannot convince its young people to create life will eventually lose the will to sustain itself. 

Young Men Still Want Children

The Vox article opens with Brandon Estrada, an 18-year-old college freshman who already has a name picked out for his future son and dreams of sharing childhood movies and toys. He represents a cohort that defies the caricature of young men as apathetic, directionless, and hostile to responsibility. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, a majority of men ages 18 to 34 still say they want children — a higher share than women in the same age group. 

This should unsettle anyone who has spent the last decade insisting that family formation is an outdated aspiration imposed by the patriarchy. Young men, across class and party lines, are not rejecting fatherhood. In a society that disempowers the male sex professionally and institutionally, young men yearn for fatherhood to fulfill their biological and existential needs. 

Yet desire alone does not produce families. Wanting children is not the same as believing one can build a life stable enough to sustain them. 

Hesitating to Procreate

Nearly every mainstream discussion of falling birth rates treats the issue as logistical: childcare costs, housing prices, parental leave. These pressures are real, but they do not explain the depth of the retreat. America’s fertility decline reflects a crisis of confidence not only in institutions but in the self. 

Gen Z is the most therapy-literate generation in history yet also one of the most medicated, anxious, and despairing. Suicide remains one of the leading causes of death for teenagers, according to 2023 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the suicide rate among young adults has risen steadily since 2014. This matters because a generation struggling to believe its own life is worth living will understandably recoil at the idea of creating another. 

For most of human history, the act of having children was not endlessly interrogated. It was understood as a natural progression of adulthood because continuity itself gave earthly suffering a purpose. 

Today, that feeling of meaningfulness has eroded in a culture saturated with distraction. In a society where every moment of discomfort can be medicated through instantaneous pleasure — by streaming, scrolling, gaming, pornography, substances, or endless digital noise — suffering no longer points anywhere beyond itself. Pain is no longer something to endure for the sake of metamorphosis; it is something to be avoided, managed, or drugged away. Even serious matters such as politics, war, sex, and death are flattened into consumable content, absorbed at a distance, and discarded when the algorithm refreshes. 

When life is lived primarily through screens, meaning becomes episodic rather than cumulative. The idea of creating something that demands long-term sacrifice — a marriage, a family, a child — feels irrational. Why commit to a future when the present offers infinite escape hatches? Why endure suffering when entertainment promises relief without responsibility? Continuity once justified pain by anchoring it to legacy. Distraction severs that link, leaving suffering to feel personal, pointless, and unbearable. 

Raised Safe, Not Capable

Another under-examined factor in Gen Z’s paralysis is how we were raised. Parents raised Gen Zers in the shadow of 9/11, terrorism, school shootings, economic collapse, and a 24-hour news cycle that frames catastrophe as omnipresent. In response, many parents did what they believed was loving and responsible: They prioritized safety above all else. 

Parents monitored, supervised, and insulated their children. Childhood became managed, leaving little room for learning from mistakes. Risk was minimized, and failure was negotiated away. Over time, this took away something essential: agency. 

A generation taught that safety is the highest good grows up unsure of its own capacity to act. When everything risky is framed as potentially traumatic, responsibility itself begins to feel unsafe. The internal locus of control — the belief that one’s choices meaningfully shape outcomes — atrophies. What replaces it is a quiet fatalism: Things happen to me; I do not make them happen. 

This helps explain why so many young adults feel overwhelmed by ordinary adult tasks, paralyzed by decision-making, and terrified of commitments such as marriage or children. Marriage requires confidence in one’s ability to navigate uncertainty, danger, and failure together. A culture that shields children from those experiences alone should not be surprised when those children hesitate to step into adulthood’s central institution. 

The Sex Divide

Young men and women are drifting apart politically, but this is not fundamentally a partisan divide. 

Modern culture tells young women that femininity is a liability — that fertility, emotional depth, and motherhood are obstacles to empowerment. It tells young men that masculinity is toxic. This does not liberate either sex. It creates distrust. Women learn to see men as burdens or threats. Men retreat into isolation, resentment, or nihilism. For some, this disillusionment becomes depression. For others, it metastasizes into the belief that life itself is disposable. 

A society that trains men and women to distrust one another cannot reproduce itself. 

Agency Is the Missing Ingredient

When marriage and family formation collapse, dependence rises. Atomized individuals, detached from spouses, children, churches, and extended kin, rely more heavily on bureaucracies and corporate systems for identity and security. A population raised to outsource risk and responsibility is especially easy to manage. 

This is why cultural elites are content to frame the birth rate crisis as a matter of subsidies and childcare credits alone. Those may help at the margins. But no policy can restore agency, purpose, or the belief that ordinary people are capable of building lives worth passing on. 

Young men, despite everything, still imagine themselves as fathers. That hope matters. It suggests that the prime directive, the ancient human drive to create, has not disappeared. It has merely been buried under fear, overprotection, and despair. 

Children do not guarantee happiness. They do not cure depression or erase trauma. But they do offer something modern life increasingly withholds: a reason to act. They force agency back into the body. They demand presence, courage, and sacrifice. For a generation raised to be safe rather than strong, that demand may be terrifying and redemptive. 

A society that forgets how to create biologically, spiritually, and culturally will not collapse all at once. It will simply drift, increasingly medicated, increasingly managed, increasingly lonely, until it no longer remembers what it was for. 

The question, then, is not whether Gen Z will have children. It is whether they will dare to reclaim agency itself to become the kind of people who believe life is worth staying for and passing on. 

Survival is instinctual. Creation is intentional. And perhaps that’s what scares us most. 

Julianna Frieman is a writer who covers culture, technology, and civilization. She has an M.A. in Communications (Digital Strategy) from the University of Florida and a B.A. in Political Science from UNC Charlotte. Her work has been published by the Daily Caller, The American Spectator, and The Federalist. Follow her on X at @juliannafrieman.