By: Julianna Frieman, The Federalist.
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?
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This should unsettle anyone who has spent the last decade insisting that family formation is an outdated aspiration imposed by the patriarchy.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.