Name: Gen Z men want babies. Gen Z women don’t. | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2026-03-05T16:37:46.000Z
Duration: 30 min 53 s
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Past simple

What was it about this topic that drew you in?

The comparative

What were you looking for when you like, started reporting on this piece on how like Gen Z, men and women are thinking about parenthood and how differently, overwhelmingly, you'll see young men more excited, more enthusiastic about having children one day than young women?

To-infinitive

I wanted to dig into it a little bit and I also wanted to ask some young men and sort of people who work with and do polling on young men, like, what does that mean, like, you want kids?

Like, what kind of a father do you want to be?

Does that mean you want to be an involved father and really spending a lot of time with your kids?

Are you imagining like some kind of trad lifestyle where like you have a stay at home wife and you're going out to the office?

My guest today is Anna north, my longtime colleague at vox, who I'm ashamed to say I've not had on the show before, but we are riding that ship today.

She writes about kids, parenthood, American family life.

How would you introduce yourself at a party?

I guess I'd say I'm a reporter and a writer, journalist and novelist.

Kids, families, parenthood, a lot of gender politics.

I mean, that's, it's a pretty, pretty broad area to cover.

I'm not sure that's a typical beat in a lot of newsrooms.

I mean, how did you, how did you land on that?

Yeah, I came to VOX as the gender reporter in 2017.

That was sort of right when MeToo was becoming really big.

And so I reported on that for about a year almost exclusively.

And since then I sort of do a lot of things, but a lot of it circles around, you know, I typically call it American Family Life.

I write a newsletter called Kids Today, which I think of really as a newsletter about kids lives, like, not so much about parenting.

There's a lot of really great parenting newsletters out there.

And I try to steer clear of advice and instead, as much as I can, just to talk to kids about their experiences and learn about what kids are experiencing right now.

And I've also kind of like been trying to have more empathy for children and figure out what it's like to be a kid today.

When I had kids, I realized like how powerless you are as a kid and how other people dictate so much of your daily life.

I find myself a lot of times, like trying to get in their headspace and think about what is that like?

And how do kids take back a little power?

I have one six year old and another one on the way actually.

Like they can dress themselves, you know, you'll be fine.

Okay, I'm mostly excited, but a little different.

Speaking of kids and having them, you've got a piece out about Gen Z and their evolving views on parenthood, which I found very interesting and surprising in some ways and maybe not so surprising in other ways.

What was it about this topic that drew in?

Was there something like some mystery you felt like you needed to solve?

Like what were you, what were you looking for when you like started reporting on this piece on how like Gen Z men and women are thinking about parenthood and how differently they're thinking about parenthood?

Yeah, no, I saw this really interesting poll of young voters, Gen Z voters, and it looked at male Trump voters, male Harris voters, female Trump voters and female Harris voters and asked them to rank, like, what are the things you think are important in a good life, essentially?

And the male Trump voters actually rated having children as number one among like 12 or 13 different options.

Not any of the women, no matter how they voted, and not male Harris voters either.

And you know, like, then I did some reporting on that poll and people said like, well, it's just one poll, maybe you shouldn't put too much stock in it.

But then if you look across polls, overwhelmingly you'll see young men more excited, more enthusiastic about having children one day than young women.

And I could think of a lot of possible reasons why that might be, but I wanted to dig into it a little bit.

And I also wanted to ask some young men and sort of people who work with and do polling on young men, like, what does that mean?

Like what kind of a father do you want to be?

Does that mean you want to be an involved father and really spending a lot of time with your kids, are you imagining like some kind of trad lifestyle where like you have a stay at home wife and you're going out to the office?

I was just very curious about like what fatherhood meant to these Gen Z men who like, are very excited to do it one day.

I have the, the numbers here and I don't want to butcher it, so I'm going to look at it.

So this was a 2023 Pew poll and 57% of men between 18 and 34 said they wanted to have kids one day, like definitively.

I guess I just would have assumed that those numbers would have been just closer.

I was kind of surprised by that as, as you say, I thought it was a pretty big gap, especially given that the narrative that I think we had heard about young Gen Z people generally over the last couple years is this is a generation that doesn't want kids.

This generation doesn't want to get married.

This is a generation that's like really worried about the future and like feel alienated and doesn't sort of want to take these steps toward conventional family.

And so I thought it was interesting that these high numbers of Gen Z men were saying like, no, actually we do want kids.

If you dig back into the historical polling, it's a little wonky.

There's some evidence that women without children for a long time have been a little bit, had a little bit more trepidation than men without children.

And partly that's for reasons that make sense.

Like they know that their careers could take a hit.

They've all, they've all read those articles about the motherhood penalty.

They know that they will probably have to give birth, which men don't have to do, you know, and deal with physical recovery and sort of deal with all of the stereotyping and stigmatizing that comes with like having a female body that becomes a mother in this world.

So it's like not weird that young women might have more anxieties.

But I think what was striking to me was the size of the gap and really the size of the enthusiasm among men of a generation that are expressing this like, pretty like, you know, conventional, conventional and pretty like social aspiration to have a family.

Having kids is just really hard and it's really expensive, increasingly expensive, especially if you live, I mean, when we lived in the D.C. area before we moved, we had a six month old daycare was $2,000 a month, a preschool, $2,000 a month.

I, I understand why people look at that and go, you know, I can't afford a house.

Like, I, this is, this is a burden I can't take on even if I want to.

And you talk to a lot of, you know, there are several young men quoted in the piece.

How do you explain their increased interest?

Why are Gen Z men, like, increasingly fired up about being a dad?

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Gen Z men want babies. Gen Z women don’t. | The Gray Area

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