One Day You’ll Thank Me: What Gen Z need to know about having kids

Birth rates are falling, but for Gen Z, it's not all bad news. Photo / Getty Images

Welcome to season four of the Herald’s parenting podcast: One Day You’ll Thank Me. Join parents and hosts Jenni Mortimer and Rebecca Haszard as they navigate the challenges and triumphs of parenting today with help from experts and well-known mums and dads from across Aotearoa.

Want to get in touch with the podcast? Email the team at odytm@nzme.co.nz.

It’s been well documented in recent years that New Zealand’s birth rate - along with the rest of the world’s - is in decline. And while National party leader Christopher Luxon may have been “joking” when he said Kiwis need to have more babies, the pronatalist movement to encourage procreation seems to be gaining traction - if only among the world’s elite.

However, a slew of reports claims that the next generation in line to start families, Gen Z, is not on board with the idea and still find themselves screaming “I’m baby,” on TikTok when their parents tell them to fork out for their own car insurance.

Fortune magazine alleges they are “less enthusiastic about having children than their parents. The reasons are many: financial, social, and biological, along with the preference among younger generations for ‘freedom’.”

On this week’s episode of One Day You’ll Thank Me, our hosts are joined by fellow parents, ZM’s Clint Roberts and How To Dad Jordan Watson for a panel discussion about what Gen Z really need to know before they have kids.

Clint Roberts and Jordan Watson share the best and worst things about having kids.

Roberts and Watson, who have launched a new podcast, The Parenting Hangover, have five children between them, all girls aged 2 to 10.

Watson says “back in the day”, in small town rural New Zealand where he grew up, “everyone had three or four.” Today the birth rate sits at 1.65 children per woman, based on data from the year to March 2023.

That puts New Zealand below the population replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.

The panel discuss the impact having children has had on their identities, their finances and whether the narrative about parenting has become too focused on the difficulties while failing to discuss the joy that having children brings.

Roberts asks: “Do we talk too much about the difficulty of having kids, if that’s what Gen Z’s hearing? And we’re not telling them so much about the absolute joy of it, then they get too caught up in the ‘Yes, it’s going to be a cost to you. Yes, it’s going to take away from your identity as you know it at the moment,’ but ...”

• To find out more about the realities of having kids and what Gen Z need to know, listen to today’s episode of One Day You’ll Thank Me below.
• You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are out every Thursday.