Your children subsidize your ambition
Levittown, NY, a post-WWII suburban single-family sprawl
Gen Z is conservative. Not culturally, but in how they respond to collapse. They grew up inside system collapse—financial crisis, institutional failure, pandemic, climate instability—and they’re responding the way post-crisis generations always do: by seeking constraint.
The Gen Z choices that confound us most are those that decrease opportunity: living with parents longer, delaying or rejecting children, choosing stable jobs over ambitious ones, preferring workplace protections over flexibility.
These aren’t signs of disengagement. They’re preparation for a correction that’s already underway.
Post-crisis generations don’t rebel, they stabilize
When large systems break, the next generation doesn’t tear them down. They stabilize them by making certain failures costly.
People who lived through the Great Depression and World War II built suburbs full of predictable single-family homes—stability at any price. But when isolated families led to spiking divorce rates, society didn’t ban divorce. It made abandonment expensive: child support, alimony, wage garnishment. You can leave, but you can’t externalize the damage.
We’re approaching the same moment with children.
Care is cheap because children pay the bill
Care looks cheap right now because children absorb the cost. Inconsistent parental presence means rotating caregivers, which harms development. But children have no enforceable rights, so the system treats this damage as free.
This isn’t a moral failure. It’s a price-signal failure. The market thinks care is cheap because no one is billing for the damage.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Molly Jong-Fast reports: “My mother was a famous feminist writer known for her candor and wit who couldn’t be bothered to spend time raising me.”
Her mother, Erica Jong, would likely agree. In an op-ed she wrote: “My travel schedule could not have been more divergent from my daughter’s schedule, so I hired nannies.” Then she showed a photo of herself cuddling her dog while her daughter leaned into the frame.
Jong writes about her parenting with impunity because children have no enforceable rights. The system treats the damage as free.
Children’s rights are coming
We can’t make parents more virtuous. But we can give children enforceable rights: consistent caregiving, adult presence, and relational continuity. The basics they need to develop without absorbing adult chaos.
Those rights will expose that jobs demanding total availability are incompatible with children. Someone other than children has to pay the cost.
Enforcement won’t target families. It will target employers. The same way payroll systems enforce child support, work structures will have to comply with care minimums. Jobs that require total availability will have to redesign roles, pay for compliant care, or accept that some positions can’t be paired with caregiving.
This is the same logic that governed divorce: don’t ban it, make abandonment costly. Applied to careers: you can have a demanding job, but you can’t externalize the cost onto children.
The TIME 100 proves care disqualifies you
In the list of TIME 100 Most Influential Women, almost none of them have children. Movie stars are the partial exception—they can buy continuity of care. But writers, activists, executives, academics? Overwhelmingly childless.
That’s selection pressure. The idea of productivity came from factories where the assumption was that time is infinitely extractable. Right now, influence is defined the same way: sustained, uninterrupted availability. Care disqualifies you by definition.
The system has already decided that care and power are incompatible. We’ve just been pretending otherwise.
Gen Z is planning for constrained time
Once children’s rights make time genuinely constrained—not just “hard to balance” but legally protected—fewer people will be able to have children. Declining fertility is capacity planning. Gen Z can feel that care is about to become structurally expensive, so they’re refusing to organize their lives around a system that only works by letting children absorb the failure.
Once children’s rights force the cost into the open, the outcomes are predictable because everything reorganizes around constraint rather than aspiration. Rather than asking How can I have it all? we ask What arrangement actually works?
Fewer children are better supported. Stable jobs overtake greedy jobs because they’re more compatible with care. Influence detaches from sheer availability. Living with parents becomes coordinated care capacity. Grandparents realize if they want grandkids they have to show up.
We are failing children today because we price them at zero. The people still chasing influence through uninterrupted availability are optimizing for a world that’s already gone. Gen Z isn’t giving up. They’re reading the future correctly.
Interesting to look at this through a price lens, but I think it only applies to the elite and elite-adjacent. For most of us, parenting isn’t about optimizing for influence or choosing between ambitious careers and children. It’s about love, irrevocably intertwined with the difficulties life hands us and how that affects our children whether we want it to or not.
Your framework assumes people are making choices between TIME 100-level influence and caregiving. Most parents aren’t in that position. They’re managing jobs that pay the bills, raising kids, and dealing with whatever chaos arrives: deaths, job loss, illness, relationship crises. When the bombs drop, you do your best to keep everyone fed and together.
I’ve lived this. The last decade brought deaths, career upheaval, and grinding family problems. We spent excessively on restaurants not because we were “externalizing costs onto children” but because we were too overwhelmed to function normally. We were in survival mode, not optimizing for career advancement.
The “price lens” works for analyzing elite choices — Erica Jong hiring nannies to maintain her travel schedule, people choosing greedy jobs over stable ones. It breaks down for everyone else. Most parents aren’t choosing between ambition and care. They’re choosing between impossible options while loving their kids and doing their best with whatever life threw at them.
Children’s rights and employer enforcement might be interesting policy ideas. But framing everyday parenting struggles as “subsidizing ambition” misses what most family life actually is: people trying not to drown while loving their children through the chaos.
I hear you. In my child-rights system, I would have my kids taken away because single parents can’t provide the kind of care that children would have a right to. So divorce or having kids on one’s own would be too costly for all but the richest people. Which I think would probably be a net positive.
Also, there would also be big benefits to low-income families. In today’s system there is no penalty to the government providing sub-par care for low-income families. If children had rights the government would have to spend a lot of money to provide compliant care.
So even though parenting is a struggle for most people, I think the parents would be less alone in that struggle if there were universally agreed upon standards of care.
I spent almost 20 years in an ambitious career. I led teams, I updated systems, I made tough decisions, I told people what they needed to hear when what they wanted to hear was the opposite. My husband had the stable career. Grandparents coordinated school drop off and pick up.
I was exhausted. I felt like a shell of a human when everyone was telling me I was proof you could be a mom with a career. My life was lived in bags. A boss once told me my car was an embarrassment, filled with items left behind in a frantic dash to the next thing. I always felt like I was behind in multiple areas of my life. And then, I quit.
I didn’t realize how expensive my career was. Everything was ordered online because the cost of doing it myself was choosing not to sleep. We ate out constantly because it was the only way I could guarantee dinner happened before bedtime. Every activity was determined by the critical question “can both kids participate?” because the schedule would fall apart if the answer was no.
I’ve changed my work entirely now. If my kids are not in school, I am not working. I don’t miss games, concerts, or activities. I drink coffee with my teenager every morning. I eat cookies after school with my preteen. I trade tasks with other moms (if you do after school pick up, I’ll do the grocery pick up for both houses). I turn off my phone without worrying what will be waiting for me when I return. I could never go back to my life from before.
Thank you so much for saying this. The details and honesty are helpful to all of us. I had all the same feelings – it’s why I can’t shut up about it. I don’t want other families to have to go through this.
Legislating “quality care” as a right…If only there was enough money for quality daycare workers, all would be well …or for women to stay home and not work at all to care full time for their children….if parenting just weren’t expensive…if people were more fair…
If only everything were more fair…
Universally agreed upon standards….
It seems you are hoping for laws and more money for this vision t become a reality.
Laws and money would “do the trick”.
Just my summary/understanding of what you are proposing.
This plan needs no extra money. Giving children the right to be well cared for chips away at parent freedom. There will be no option to send a kid to a caregiver while the parent works because that’s part-time caregiving which we know is not good for children. So every family that wants children will need to work out who is the fulltime caregiver.
We already have this with divorce. People who have to pay child support say ALL THE TIME that they can’t afford it and it’s unreasonable. Divorce chips away at parent freedom.
Freedom is the sacrifice someone makes to be a parent. We are just trying to calibrate how much it should be.
While the operative word at the end of your reply post may seem to be “calibrate”, for me it is always the “we”. Who is “we”? Who are the people deciding on the calibration? How was it decided they they get to do direct the process..What qualifications do you have to have to know how to calibrate something like this?
I’m not asking for a response…just pondering your way of thinking.
Money and freedom and how to have them while being the primary caretaker of another person or even several people…
It is interesting that you present this topic as a dilemma that needs to be solved…and you regularly talk about it from different angles. Your solutions have to do with rights and laws and material models of fairness.
Just observing/summarizing your views.
We is you.
You already believe parents should not divorce and abandon their children in the street. You already believe that children should limit parent freedom because you do not believe a parent has the right to purposely let a child starve.
I’m asking you to think more precisely about where parent freedom ends and the child’s right begin. And, while I’m asking you to do that, I’m thinking about it myself as well.
I read your posts because even though I have a fundamentally different prism on life than you do, being an ENFJ, I am interested in different perspectives. Your blog has not only your perspective but those of your commenters.
Hi Penelope,
I check in and out with you over the years. In this blog post, I’m noticing a more technocratic tone. Is that because you are working in research now or are you using AI to edit.
For me this new cycle is all about AI. The last cycle was digital everything. It took a lot of attention to keep with the the online world as we transitioned from paper. But now we can access all of our files of information in our hand help phones. Now we will have robot assistants to organize and interpret the electronic data. Will it give us more time to spend raising children, being human? Here is hoping!
I had to google “technocratic tone” and it’s telling that I didn’t know what it was until now. I think you’re right that I’m veering toward that. I have a lot more time to work on posts right now — more than I’ve had in the last 20 years, I think. So there’s room for me to do more analysis. And it’s true that I got a lot of training at that during my recent stint at Harvard. I think I’m trying to figure out where the balance is. Your feedback is helpful.
I’m especially noticing changes in people’s written voice as AI has taken off in the last year or so. I see the benefits of having a quick free copywriter/editor. But will we filter out unique language choices?
The Erica Jong oped you link and quote does not contain the quote you give nor is it by Erica Jong (it’s by her daughter). In fact the quote does not appear to exist on the internet (outside of your post). Where did you find it?
Thanks for catching that. I accidentally published Molly’s link twice. Here’s the link:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704462704575590603553674296
I really enjoyed this piece — it gave me a bold perspective on how having kids and career ambition interact, and it made me think about how life choices, meaning, and personal priorities can shape your path in ways I hadn’t really considered before.
I think in every ethnicity in North America, there is already women on top not doing kids, the women at home doing kids, the women who outsource a lot so they can pick and choose what to do with kids, and women falling off the edges of society because they have no family or connections to anyone else.
Ambition doesn’t make my parenting bond with my daughter a meaningful experience anymore for my generation of parenting. It was a meaningful goal between my mom and me while I was growing up because we were in absolute poverty.
So perhaps autism is the next label to signal cultural shift that gets women talking to each other. Immigrant moms don’t socialize the same way as generational moms with a built-in network. Working moms don’t truly socialize with SAHM moms. School teacher moms don’t socialize with scientist moms. Sport moms don’t socialize with FIRE moms.
I have Zoomers, and they were raised in freedom. I quit to look after them and developed an income that could travel with them. They know freedom; they spent their lives in freedom. I keep telling them how great this freedom is and how much better it is than my previous career. And what do they do? They are “preferring workplace protections over flexibility”. I had no idea that was a thing with these kids. I just assumed they wouldn’t choose freedom until they were well acquainted with the life society wants us to live.