Why Our Generation Is Terrified To Become Parents

Confidence is built by doing hard things, not by watching perfect screenshots of other people’s success. Scroll through your Instagram feed, and you’ll see it everywhere: sunny nurseries adorned with high-end furniture in chic neutral tones, smiling toddlers in perfectly coordinated outfits eating lunch in a spotless high chair, and captioned carousel posts about slow, graceful motherhood. You might blink a few times and think, “Wow, I could never.” But those photos are hardly ever authentic, candid snapshots into a woman’s life. They’re more often just performances of what perfection looks like, staged for public audiences, where the only visible mess is thoughtfully curated and the mother always looks like she has it under control. For many young women, that imagery doesn’t spark hope or a yearning to dive headfirst into the gauntlet that is parenthood. It fosters fear. Instead of making motherhood feel attainable, social media has pretty much made it a vocation you must excel in before you even try. Your nursery is already finished, and it’s picturesque. You’ve got the perfect products for postpartum glow, and they’re pricey. Your parenting strategy is already caption-ready, and it’ll go off without a hitch. For a generation already drowning in comparison culture, these images backfire as inspo and instead become a checklist of fears. For a generation already drowning in comparison culture, these images backfire as inspo and instead become a checklist of fears: What if I could never live up to that? Would my child grow up poorly? That anxiety isn’t just anecdotal; it’s actually measurable. According to Independent Women’s new national polling published in a report titled “The Dating Decade: Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Swiping Right,” the top reason young adults say they don’t want kids isn’t the cost associated, isn’t a hit to their career, and isn’t even climate change. It’s doubt in their own ability as parents. The Myth of Readiness What you see on social media is cultural conditioning, not individual deficiency. Society tells young people, especially women, that you must get ahead in your career, you must beautify your body, you must polish up your emotions, and you must think through your parenting strategies before even trying to become a parent. The result? A generation waiting for a mythical “right moment” that never arrives. This mentality is particularly destructive because it conflates confidence with readiness. Real preparation for major life commitments doesn’t come from advanced planning or pre-approved feelings. It comes from experience itself. Though some people naturally have a knack for childcare, most don’t become good parents because they’ve cracked some code. They become good parents because they grow into that role, make mistakes, and learn through unconditional love. The result is a generation waiting for a mythical “right moment” that never arrives. I know this feeling almost too well. Before welcoming my daughter into the world, I accidentally consumed way too much mommy content on Instagram. Reel after reel, I’d see product recommendations, unequivocal do’s and don’ts lists for each milestone age, and day-in-the-life routines. Sure, I learned a few tips and tricks from those videos. They were helpful to a degree, but also weirdly haunting to me. I’d be up in the wee small hours of the morning, feeling out of sorts during another wake window, and wonder why it’s somehow hard for me but seems so easy for everyone else. It took my husband reassuring me that I'm a good mother to our daughter, and reminding me that, compared to a lot of people, I just have really high standards and expectations, to realize how irrational all my self-defeating thoughts were. After all, during my pregnancy, I told myself to intentionally lower my expectations because I was diving right into an entirely new life experience. I began to sympathize with the women who see media portrayals of motherhood and feel a major disconnect between something generations have done since the dawn of humankind and their own personal abilities. Day after day, the journey felt more like home. I mellowed out my mind, and I surrendered my ego. I still have so much to learn, but I find myself excited by the opportunities. I still have reasonably high standards, of course, but I'm genuinely fine with the fact that my parenting isn’t perfectly curated. And to be frank, it’s not even that way for the influencers pushing that narrative themselves. Why Self-Esteem Isn’t the Same as Confidence Here’s the other paradox tirelessly at work: young adults are arguably more self-aware than any generation before them, yet in the deepest moments, many feel they lack the internal fortitude to build families. Decades of psychological messaging have emphasized self-esteem over self-efficacy. You can probably recall the tone you were spoken to with in grade school, how you were given a sticker or a sucker for basic tasks, how you literally or metaphorically were handed participation trophies left and right. Feeling good about yourself was once a concept that came from taking risks and building competence, and oftentimes that meant a difficult, uncertain journey. Now, self-esteem is treated like a prerequisite for life’s biggest decisions. You're basically supposed to feel capable before you do the things that cultivate real capacity. Parenting, like marriage, isn’t something that greets you with a set of instructions and a perfect playbook. That’s just backwards. Parenting, like marriage, isn’t something that greets you with a set of instructions and a perfect playbook. You can take classes, you can get pamphlets from the hospital, you can buy all the products that promise to be “life hacks,” but when you get home, it’s not going to look like the textbook example. It’s messy. It’s trial and error. It’s simultaneously joyful and confusing. And ultimately, it’s inside that tricky tension that growth happens. But when social media amplifies only the curated highlight reel, we can’t see the process of becoming a parent. We only see the product. Learning to Love in a Swipe Culture This hesitancy about parenthood is a symptom of a larger crisis in how young adults now approach love, dating, and relationships. Young adults today still ideally want serious relationships. In the Independent Women polling, more than half of those surveyed want sex only within a committed relationship, and a significant majority hope to marry someday. But the dating culture young generations have inherited, one dominated by apps, performative bios, casual hookups, and superficial validation loops, doesn’t usually help anyone develop the confidence or interpersonal relationship skills that lead to long-term partnerships. Much like the curated mommy feeds, digital dating apps emphasize presentations over meaningful interactions. You’re expected to carefully stage your profile, trim your bio to the most marketable self, even if it’s not authentically you, and your worth is often judged in swipes. It’s a modern-day “Buy-A-Bride.” What’s lost in this process is the unease, uncertainty, awkwardness, and vulnerability that come with real relationship building. As other recent research on dating patterns published by the Institute for Family Studies suggests, many young adults lack confidence in their dating skills and report both infrequent and unsatisfying dating experiences. This isn’t due to a lack of desire. They want connection. We’re all biologically wired that way. But they’re siphoned into an environment that rarely rewards genuine vulnerability or meaningful practice. That hesitancy bleeds into self-doubt about parenthood. If you don’t even feel competent at dating or forming intimate connections, it’s a much shorter leap to thinking, “Oh yeah, maybe I’m not cut out for that parenting thing either.” Gain Your Confidence Through Doing So, what can we do? The crisis we’re witnessing is real, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility to correct. If we want our generation and one following it to feel confident stepping into parenthood, we need to do two things: dispel the curated myth and normalize the process, and teach relationship skills that build real confidence. While it can feel uncomfortable to air your dirty laundry online, we need more honest, modern portrayals of parenting in both media and everyday conversation. Not just more so-called “authentic” Instagram moms, either. What young women actually need is a clearer picture of how imperfect motherhood really is, from their friends, their families, and the media they consume. They need to know how universal this fear is, and that the growth doesn’t happen before motherhood begins. It happens because of it. Adulthood is learned through pseudo-apprenticeship. Sure, schools used to teach practical skills, but today, most of us are thrown into a world we're expected to navigate without much exposure beyond television and social media. Think about how perceptions could change if more young adults spent time with nieces and nephews, tried babysitting or getting involved in community childcare, or simply volunteered in environments with kids. I’ve had many a moment in my daughter’s young life where I’m thankful I babysat for multiple kids when I was a teenager. And beyond that, I’m thankful I chose to volunteer as a student teacher for preschool ballet and tap classes, and summer Princess Camp at the dance studio I grew up attending. Confidence grows from proximity as well as participation, not abstract “preparation” or watching morning routines on TikTok. Growth doesn’t happen before motherhood begins. It happens because of it. But that doesn’t discount the fact that moms who have lived it can be powerful storytellers. Sharing anecdotes of doubt turned into a moment of triumph, of mistakes that deepened their commitment and tested their fortitude, of the early days that didn’t look like Instagram feeds. Real talk like that rescues the idea of parenthood from this altar of perfection. Historically, parenting knowledge came from extended families, intergenerational households, or other community relationships like faith groups. Reviving or recreating that closeness, where young adults could absorb skills by participating in the lives of those a few steps ahead of them, could do more to ease this generational anxiety than any perfectly captioned and filtered post ever could. It’s easy to look at the numbers and feel frightened by a generation adrift, especially when you’re part of that demographic. But what the data actually reveals is that our generation hasn't given up on love, commitment, or family. They're are burdened by the signals they’ve been given, and they’re under-equipped by the cultural training wheels they’ve been handed. Our generation still wants what so many of us yearn for: partnership and a real legacy. If we can move past perfection and performance and instead move toward purposeful practice, then perhaps today’s hesitation can become tomorrow’s real commitment. And that’s not because fears will disappear. After all, I still have my moments of emotional weakness and self-doubt. But I’ve realized that confidence is built by stepping forward anyway.