It’s hard to imagine today, but there was a time when getting married and having a family, while building a community of friends and perhaps finding a hobby or two, was considered the mark of a rich and successful life. Work was a necessary part of life, but it wasn’t the whole enchilada.
Today it is, at least for millennials. While most Americans have jobs, millennials were groomed to spend a shocking amount of time and money building careers. As a result, they’re rich. According to new data from Pew Research Center, millennials (currently between the ages 22-37) earn more than young adult households did at nearly any time in the past 50 years.
Millennials earn more, obviously, because they work more. They work more because the message they received from their baby boomer parents and educators was that work should be the focus of their lives. Marriage and family can come later, if it comes at all.
This was a monumental shift in values and priorities, and it was addressed primarily to women, whose feminist mothers had nothing good to say about men and marriage. Why would they? Their own marriages failed. Who were they to help their children find lasting love?
Millennial women got the memo and as a result spent their childbearing years focused on work. According to Pew, the two main reasons for rising household incomes is that more young women are working full time, and more women are earning more for their work. Ergo, it’s millennial women who are making this generation rich.
But there’s a flip side to this story. Millennials may be wealthier than any previous generation, but they’re also the most depressed generation in history. They suffer from crippling self-doubt and anxiety and have no idea how to be married or how to raise children. “Young people have traded away what is truly important — happiness, fulfillment, and being rich with relationships — in exchange for monetary wealth and a materialistic society,” writes Washington Examiner contributor Jack Elbaum.
This reality hit home recently during a lengthy conversation I had with a 32-year-old newly married woman who couldn’t make heads or tails out of how, or even if, to fit motherhood into the life she and her new husband have built, one that isn’t conductive to caring for babies. Other millennial women I’ve heard from know they want to have children but realize too late that the man they’ve chosen can’t support their desire to stay home. That’s because they were explicitly taught to “never depend on a man.” Finally, there are the women who literally can’t have kids because they simply waited too long.
That’s the legacy baby boomers left millennials.
Now what?
Suzanne Venker (@SuzanneVenker) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is an author, speaker and cultural critic known as “The Feminist Fixer.” She has authored several books to help women win with men in life and in love. Her most recent, The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men & Marriage, was published in February 2017. Suzanne’s website is www.suzannevenker.com.
