Generation Dad |
“I definitely want to have kids,” Branden Estrada, an 18-year-old college freshman, told me. “I had such a good family life that I’ve always thought about what it’s going to be like for me to have kids of my own.”
Estrada is excited to share his favorite Transformers and Spider-Man movies with his kids, and he’s put some of his old toys aside to pass down to them. He knows he’s up to the task, because he grew up with a younger sister. “I’m used to having someone to take care of,” he told me.
He even has a name picked out: Stavros, to honor his family’s Greek heritage. “I thought it was just a cool name, because you can shorten it to be like Stav,” he said.
Key takeaways
Some polls show that Gen Z men are more likely to want kids than Gen Z women. Other research has shown Gen Z men expressing conservative ideas about gender, suggesting they might expect female partners to take the lead in child care. But there’s also evidence that younger fathers are doing more caregiving than men of previous generations — and that trend could continue with Gen Z.I reached out to Estrada after I saw him in a focus group of Gen Z Americans hosted by The Otherhood Collective, an online community for nontraditional families. He’s part of an especially scrutinized group these days: Young men today are widely seen, rightly or wrongly, as a generation adrift. They can’t get jobs, they aren’t seeing friends, and their isolation and disaffection have been blamed for recent mass shootings and political violence. But even if Gen Z men are increasingly cut off from society (a claim some would dispute), there’s one very social endeavor they still want to participate in: having kids.
While not everyone has a name picked out, Estrada’s excitement and optimism around fatherhood aren’t unusual. In a 2023 Pew Research Center poll, 57 percent of men between 18 and 34 said they wanted to have kids one day, compared with 45 percent of women.
“There’s been this cultural understanding that it’s women who are driving the desire to get married and have kids,” said Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute. “But now there’s a raft of polling that is suggesting that’s possibly no longer the case.”
Across party lines and demographic groups, young men are eager to be dads. In a........