Why having a Gen Z child means parenting an adult

Jonathan McHugh illustration of a man being pushed on a child’s swing by his elderly mother

Do you know where your 22-year-old is right now? A quarter of parents are tracking adult children on their phones, according to a new American survey.

My friends and I used to joke about the Tiger Mothers at the school gate, rushing their kids to violin classes and extra maths, determined to win a race we didn’t even know we were in. There were children who had never been on a bus, knowing only the car, and who were nervous at our old-fashioned birthday parties in the garden, being used to orchestration by an educational entertainer.

Along with many psychiatrists, we assumed that such intensive parenting would create adults who are either deeply anxious, or who would leave home as fast as they could. But it may not be that simple. Two new surveys by America’s Pew Research Center find only 9 per cent of 18 to 34-year-olds saying their parents are too involved in their lives, despite majorities of parents admitting to texting or phoning their offspring several times a week, and giving advice on jobs, finances and health.

Gen Z seem pretty Zen with parents who can’t let go. Far from being fed up with all the intrusion, the majority say they rely on their parents for emotional and financial support. I find this rather reassuring. I cherish every day that our children remain willing to put up with us.

It does, though, raise an entirely different question. In focusing on the strain that helicopter parents may place on kids, we have ignored the increasing emotional and financial burden being shouldered by modern parents. The cost of raising children is rising all over the developed world, not least because parents are shelling out for childcare, clubs and activities to boost academic success. Working mothers spend as much time with children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s: in the UK, nearly half of working-age women do up to 45 hours a week of childcare: more than the average working week. Some are also looking after elderly parents.

The most striking finding of the Pew survey is that 71 per cent of parents say their children’s successes and failures reflect on the job they’ve done as parents. This feels like a big shift from earlier generations who felt pride if their children did well, but didn’t take credit for their achievements. Nor did they beat themselves up if Little Johnny hit mild turbulence.

Perhaps people with memories of a world war were more willing to acknowledge the role that luck — good and bad — plays in life. Or perhaps the modern parent, screaming at their child on the touchline or doing their homework for them, is expecting a more sharply delineated return on investment. Heartbreakingly, a quarter say they have felt “disappointed” in their child: a word which feels more apt for someone who joins a gang than someone who (I imagine) has failed to land an internship.

Relentless parenting to turn children into status symbols, fulfilling a particular definition of success, used to be chiefly an upper-class phenomenon. But now it is sweeping society. In the US, parents of all classes support intensive parenting and extracurricular activities. In the UK, some lower-income parents report being acutely aware of the effect they can have on a child’s development, and over 70 per cent of parents of young children report feeling judged by others.

Understanding the importance of reading, and interacting with infants, has undeniable benefits. It’s also rational to want to boost your child’s chances in a world where academic success is increasingly correlated with higher wages, and where Gen Z are the first generation likely to be worse off than their parents. The economists Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti have found that countries with the most intensive parenting are often those with the most economic anxiety. Families are more relaxed in socially mobile Sweden, for example, than in the more unequal US and UK.

Even so, it can’t be healthy that some of the parents who started out playing Bach to babies in utero have now graduated to making their 20-somethings’ hairdressing appointments, phoning their employers about issues at work, and even arriving on university campuses to wake them up and make them breakfast. But it reflects a wider trend: as we live longer, adolescence seems to be extending, and people are settling down later. Since the financial crisis, fewer children can afford to rent: in southern Italy, 73 per cent of young men aged 18 to 34 are still living at home.

This raises questions about how we, as a society, navigate these changes. What should adult children expect of their parents, and what should parents expect of themselves? When do modern children actually become “grown-up”? And how much should we know about their lives?

Had FindmyFriends been available to my mother, I have no doubt she would have used it — and she would have seen me in all sorts of compromising places (though I could probably have pretended the motorbike was a car). There are certain things we shouldn’t know about our kids, and shouldn’t want to. Yet when I asked some students about the advent of GPS Big Brother, one said it makes her feel safer and another said he uses it to keep an eye on his parents, who don’t even know how to track him. These responses feel rather grown-up.

In placing overwhelming expectations on themselves, today’s parents will be a hard act to follow. I regularly speak to groups of young people about the demographic shifts that are a consequence of falling birth rates: few are keen to take on the task of child rearing, which feels ever more momentous. The paradox is that in going the extra mile to support them, parents may be reducing their chances of ever getting a grandchild.

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