Life

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.

The post Your children subsidize your ambition appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.