The one goal that unites most Gen Z men

“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.

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 May 2025 survey by Young Men Research Project, an organization focused on Gen Z polling, 63 percent of men ages 18 to 29 said having children was important to them. Republicans were the most bullish on parenthood, with 76 percent saying having kids was important to them, but a majority — 58 percent — of Democrats said the same. And within right-leaning America, an NBC News Decision Desk Poll of Gen Z youth conducted last August found male Trump voters ranked having children as the most important factor in a successful life, ahead of marriage, financial independence, and a fulfilling career (having kids ranked sixth on the list for female Trump voters, and 12th for female Harris voters).

Wanting to have kids is one thing; wanting to raise them is another. Some polling suggests that young men today subscribe to more conservative gender roles — in a 30-country study conducted in 2025, 28 percent of Gen Z men said a stay-at-home dad was “less of a man,” compared with 25 percent of millennials and just 12 percent of baby boomers. 

But the experts and young men I spoke with told a more complex story — one of a cohort that’s authentically excited about fatherhood, even if it may take some work to get there.

“They’re basically saying, I want a family; I want to raise the next generation,” said Misty Heggeness, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Kansas.

The Gen Z parenthood gap

As birth rates fall around the world, policymakers and media outlets have devoted more and more attention to young people’s attitudes toward childrearing. Those attitudes are complex, and what people tell pollsters doesn’t always match what they end up doing in their lives. 

Still, experts — and young people themselves — sometimes describe a gender gap when it comes to procreation. Ernest Ntangu, a 23-year-old consultant in mergers and acquisitions, told me that his male friends typically see having kids as “a natural next step.” Among his female friends, he said, there’s a lot more trepidation.

The gender gap on kids may not be entirely new — one 1990 survey found that 15 percent of Canadian women without kids never wanted to have them, compared with 10 percent of men. But for women, the opportunity cost of having children has never been higher — as they’ve entered the workforce and approached wage parity with men, they have more to give up if they take time off to raise kids, said Heggeness, author of the new book Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy. 

For heterosexual women, there’s the added concern that a male partner may be unwilling or unable to share the workload of parenting, or may even add to women’s burden by requiring their own emotional maintenance. “Women are looking at the state of affairs, and they’re kind of saying, ‘Gee, I don’t know,’” Heggeness said.

Women still do the majority of caregiving in American homes. And there’s some evidence that young men aspire to a “traditional” division of labor — when Young Men Research Project asked young respondents what it means to be a man, the most popular choice was “providing for your family.” 

“The breadwinner model is something that certainly has not abated,” Charlie Sabgir, director of the project, told me.

What fatherhood means for young men

However, norms of fatherhood may be changing, if slowly. When the pandemic shuttered schools and daycare centers, many men found themselves spending more time with their kids — and that change has persisted, Heggeness and her team have found. Fathers of children under 10 are doing about 1.2 more hours of child care per week than they were pre-Covid. 

Young men today are also more likely to take parental leave, and more likely to be engaged in hands-on child care than their fathers, Heggeness said. She pointed to celebrities like podcaster and former NFL player Jason Kelce, a father of four who often talks about his family life.

“He doesn’t do as much in the house as Kylie Kelce does,” Heggeness said, but “you can hear their stories about him putting the girls to sleep, or helping in the bathroom when there’s potty training.”

Ntangu would love to have five kids one day, he told me. When it comes to raising them, he’s not interested in the “heteronormative” model in which “the father’s the one that’s really being the breadwinner and the mother is doing a lot of the caretaking,” he said.

Rather, he hopes he and his future partner can each play to their strengths. For him, that would mean doing physical activities with his kids and teaching them confidence, but also making dinner.

“I love cooking,” Ntangu said. “I would be perfectly comfortable with making all the meals.”

Estrada, too, hopes for an equitable division of labor. “I would really want to see what my partner needs from me,” he said. “If I didn’t have the job that required the most time, then I would probably take more care.”

What tomorrow’s dads (and moms) need

Of course, hoping for an equitable division of labor and actually achieving it aren’t the same thing. If young men are going to realize their family goals, then they’ll have to get women on board — women who no longer face the same economic and social pressure to marry and procreate that their grandmothers did.

“It really requires a bunch of earnest and serious conversations,” Heggeness said. “How are we going to divide all the work that’s involved in growing a human and educating a human?”

Policies that reduce the cost to women of having kids could also help close the gender gap in family desires, Heggeness said. Those include affordable child care and paid parental leave, especially if it includes leave reserved for fathers, which has shifted social norms in Scandinavian countries.

Young men and women alike, meanwhile, worry about being able to afford kids amid a raft of rising costs, even if they’re gainfully employed like Ntangu. He says the price of housing, especially in urban areas, might keep him from having as many kids as he wants.

Estrada is excited about the prospect of universal child care in New York City, and believes programs like that could help him raise a family one day. “It’s such a hard time to afford anything for so many Americans,” he said.

Despite these concerns, young men display a striking hopefulness around their ability to be dads one day. Though only 45 percent of men in the Young Men Research Project survey said they felt financially stable, 57 percent believed they’d be able to afford kids in the near future.

“For all the discussion about this hopeless demographic,” Sabgir said, “when you actually ask about your future, there’s this optimism.”

It’s an optimism clearly on display when young men talk about the families they’d like to have. 

“Having kids is where I think that I would get my ultimate meaning,” Ntangu said. “What I’m looking forward to with having kids is being able to give them the best life that I possibly can.”

“I just feel like it’s going to be so much fun,” Estrada said.