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    Gen Z: How Will You Remake the American Dream?

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    Americans of all ages are increasingly skeptical of the American dream. As a new crop of shiny young people graduate from high school, college and professional schools this month, we wanted to ask: What might a new vision for the future look like?The old version of the dream seems increasingly irrelevant for people in their teens and 20s. Sociologists call it the success sequence: graduate from college, get a job, get married, have children, in that order. Buying a house for those kids to run around in is supposed to be the capstone.But with untenable costs locking many out of the housing market and parts of the country becoming uninsurable because of potential climate damage, homeownership is no longer a top goal for everyone.Because finding the right job can prove difficult and many entry-level jobs could be vulnerable to artificial intelligence, some Americans in their 20s and 30s sought the solace of steady, unglamorous government work … until this year, when the so-called Department of Government Efficiency took a wrecking ball to federal jobs. It’s not just the federal work force that’s in disarray; our entire democracy seems more precarious than it’s been in a long time.More people are questioning the value of higher education than in recent memory, with only a quarter of Americans saying that college is extremely or very important. Nearly 50 percent of Americans “say it’s less important today than it was in the past for someone to have a four-year degree in order to get a well-paying job,” according to Pew Research.“Gen Z on Marriage: In This Economy?” read a headline in The Wall Street Journal last year, and it could also act as a mission statement for people in their 20s, who are either putting off or forgoing marriage and babies entirely.Tell us about about your American dream.Readers 18 to 30, what does the American dream look like for you, regardless of what the phrase means in popular culture? More

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      Trump’s Cuts to Education Will Hit the Disabled the Hardest

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      Last week, President Trump introduced the Special Education Simplified Funding Program as part of his 2026 budget proposal. The president’s budget isn’t binding, but it suggests that the way the administration proposes to allocate funds to the states could have an impact on the education of students with disabilities, both in classroom instruction and enforcement of minimum standards.For almost 50 years, parents of students with disabilities have relied on federal oversight to ensure that their children receive a fair education. But under the proposed budget, money earmarked for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) comes with a promise to limit the federal government’s role in education and provide states with greater flexibility, which could mean drastically reducing oversight of how states will use that money.To me and many other parents of the 7.5 million public school students in the country served by IDEA, Mr. Trump’s efforts to eliminate the Department of Education and potentially just give IDEA funding directly to the states is our worst nightmare.Last spring, a group of parents in Oklahoma filed a complaint with the State Department of Education against the Bixby School District, stating that the district had placed their children in segregated classrooms, and that it did not try instead to use supplementary aides and support services, thereby violating the law under IDEA. When students with disabilities are educated primarily in such segregated classrooms, they are often denied the full breadth of learning opportunities and interactions. Most significantly, they learn they do not belong among their peers.Nick and Kristen Whitmer chose to live in Bixby, a suburb of Tulsa, because of the school district’s reputation for inclusive special education. This was what they wanted for their daughter, Adaline, who is 8 years old and has Down syndrome. But her experience last fall hadn’t been what they hoped. Adaline spent less than half of her time at school in a general education classroom. She started her day there with a morning meeting with the other children. But after 10 minutes, a teacher guided her down the hall to the special education room. She rejoined other first graders for recess and lunch, but spent little time in an academic classroom with nondisabled peers. It was hard for Adaline to make friends with classmates. “Adaline is not viewed as a member of the community,” Ms. Whitmer told me. “She is a guest.”In preschool, Adaline had been placed in the Oklahoma Alternative Assessment Program, which is reserved for “students with the most significant cognitive disabilities.” That meant that Bixby district administrators determined Adaline would not be given the opportunity to earn a high school diploma. Ms. Whitmer said that she pleaded with district representatives to put her daughter on the diploma track, but that they initially refused and began bringing a lawyer to meetings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      My Mother and I Bond Over Ignoring Mother’s Day

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      We never celebrated Mother’s Day when I was growing up. Both my parents came from families that considered the holiday to be phony pageantry that was more about putting money in the pocket of Big Florist than it was about showing love and respect for our elders. I can’t remember ever really acknowledging the occasion as a child; it just wasn’t part of our family culture.When I became a mother myself, it never occurred to me to honor the day. Fighting hoards of my fellow New Yorkers for an overpriced brunch reservation is my personal hell. Even the idea of being the center of my family’s special attention is somewhat mortifying to me; I’m not a big birthday person for this reason, either.Of course, I love it when my daughters make me cards for any reason — I’m not that much of a jerk. While I acknowledge that the day is painful for many people who have lost or are estranged from their mothers, I don’t think we should get rid of the occasion; many find joy in it. It is just not for me.The woman credited with creating our modern notion of Mother’s Day would likely agree with my family’s salty spirit. According to the Smithsonian’s blog, Anna Jarvis lobbied for a national Mother’s Day in the early 1900s to honor her mother, Ann Jarvis. Ann spent her entire life working to promote peace, unity and public health — most of Ann’s dozen children “died from diseases such as diphtheria or measles, which were common during her day in the Appalachian area of Virginia,” and so she devoted her life to the hygiene of her community. (Ann is probably rolling over in her grave right now as measles and whooping cough surge.)A further irony: Anna was so appalled at the commercialization of the holiday she championed that she later tried to get Mother’s Day canceled. She ultimately “died penniless in a sanitarium where her bills were paid by the same greeting card companies and florists she despised,” according to the Smithsonian.I shared the Jarvises’ story with my mother, who was not surprised. “Anything which can be commercialized will ultimately be corrupted,” she texted me. The only family holidays we really get into are Passover and Thanksgiving, because they are just about getting together over a big meal. I don’t know how you’d tart up Passover — plague-themed stemware? As for Thanksgiving, my mother put it well: “no one profits except the turkey farmers.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Johnson Moves to Block a Bill Allowing New Parents in the House to Vote by Proxy

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      A long-simmering fight over whether to allow members of Congress to vote remotely after the birth of a new child is coming to a head on Tuesday afternoon, when Speaker Mike Johnson’s behind-the-scenes efforts to quash the majority-supported change to the chamber’s rules will be tested on the House floor.The quiet push from a bipartisan group of younger lawmakers and new parents started more than a year ago, when Representative Anna Paulina Luna, Republican of Florida, began agitating for a change to House rules that would allow new mothers to designate a colleague to vote by proxy on their behalf for up to six weeks after giving birth. Ms. Luna landed on the idea after her own child was born.There is no maternity or paternity leave for members of Congress, who can take time away from the office without sacrificing their pay but cannot vote if they are not physically in the Capitol. Proponents of the change have called it a common-sense fix to modernize Congress, where there are more women and more younger members than there were 200 years ago.Democrats including Representatives Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, who gave birth to her second child earlier this year, and Sara Jacobs of Colorado joined Ms. Luna’s effort, expanding the resolution to include new fathers and up to 12 weeks of proxy voting during a parental leave.But Mr. Johnson has adamantly opposed them at every turn, arguing that proxy voting is unconstitutional, even though the Supreme Court refused to take up a Republican-led lawsuit challenging pandemic-era proxy voting rules in the House. Mr. Johnson and his allies have argued that any accommodation that allow members to vote without being physically at the Capitol, no matter how narrow, creates a slippery slope for more, and that it harms member collegiality.“I do believe its an existential issue for this body,” Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and chairwoman of the Rules Committee, said on Tuesday. “Congress is defined as the ‘act of coming together and meeting.’” Changing that, she said, “undermines the fabric of that sacred act of convening.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Shaming Child-Free People Doesn’t Raise the Birthrate

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      On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data on fertility trends from 1990 to 2023, showing that the birthrate declined slightly in 2023 to 1.62 from 1.66 in 2022. The demographer Jennifer Sciubba summarized the statistics in her newsletter, noting that overall, fertility has declined 22 percent since 1990 in the United States but that “the real decline is much more recent, taking a turn around 2007, just before the Great Recession.”The biggest drop in fertility is among teenagers, Sciubba writes, and the birthrate among women over 30 has increased, with a particular surge in births among women over 40. Sciubba predicts that the birthrate overall will plateau, continuing to hover between 1.55 and 1.7 for the next decade.Being below replacement birthrate presents economic challenges, including to Social Security, though this may not yet be cause for immediate alarm. I don’t know how you can argue that fewer teenage parents is a bad thing, since very few teenagers are emotionally or financially equipped to raise children.I’m not worried that the United States is going to become South Korea. That country, which has the world’s lowest birthrate at 0.75, is the subject of a recent article by The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who does a good job describing what a truly anti-natal society looks like. A 20-something South Korean woman tells him: “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.”Governmental and societal pressure has not really worked to increase the birthrate in South Korea. It’s a society that enforces traditional gender roles and that blames feminists and working women for the decline in fertility. “The insinuation that women are at fault for the demographic crisis has turned gender friction into gender war,” Lewis-Kraus writes, with women swearing off men entirely with the 4B movement rather than become tradwives.In the United States, we see our own very muted version of this dynamic playing out. Religious conservatives slam “childless cat ladies,” and in return, some liberal young women are going “boy sober.” Again, I do not predict that this is going to greatly affect the birthrate in the near term; the United States is a much more gender-progressive and diverse country than South Korea is.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Steeling My Daughters Against a New Kind of Misogyny

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      Since President Trump started announcing his cabinet picks, I have been trying to write a Very Serious Essay about the Current State of Feminism.When Pete Hegseth was confirmed, even after so many horrifying details of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, that seemed like an obvious blow to the basic ideals of gender equality. In a marginally just world for women, credible allegations of sexual or domestic violence would prevent a person from being considered for such a vaunted position in the first place.I started trying to write this essay by gathering data about women’s progress and trying to quantify how it has stalled. Though the vibes seem truly awful, I didn’t want to go by just potentially illusory internet trends or the vile choices of our commander in chief.Yet it would be disingenuous to ignore how far we have come since the 1970s, when most women didn’t even have access to credit. Women now outnumber men at American colleges and in the college-educated labor force. A higher percentage of Gen Z women say they’re feminists than women of any other generation.But: Roe is dead. Who knows what might happen with access to contraceptives or abortion medication in the next four years?We’re in a period of backlash against women’s progress, beyond what is happening in and around the Oval Office. “Surveys from 2024 show that support for traditional gender roles is increasing” among both Republican men and Republican women, according to the political scientists Michael Tesler, John Sides and Colette Marcellin in a guest essay for Times Opinion. They conclude that “any growing gender traditionalism may be a reaction to societal trends and not a cause of these trends.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Doesn’t My Son’s Adviser Understand That Boys Will Be Boys?

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      A father objects to his son’s punishment after a rowdy “tickle fight” in a darkened room, but an adviser isn’t budging on the decision to bar the boy from a future activity.In December, my son attended a religious retreat away from home. When some of the high school boys were in a room alone with girls, the boys got overexcited, turned off the lights and yelled “Tickle fight!” One of the girls was touched on the shoulder, but nothing remotely sexual happened. The adviser to the group has barred the boys involved from the next retreat. But I think it’s important for them to attend and discuss what happened rather than suffer an exclusionary punishment. Excluding the boys will only make things worse for the girl: Everyone knows she is the reason the boys won’t be there. I think it would be better to have the girl explain to the boys (with adult support) why their behavior was wrong. But I can’t convince the adviser. Thoughts?DADI think your love for your son is impeding your judgment. When children are at home, their parents are the arbiters of appropriate discipline. But when they go off with youth groups, for instance, those organizations assume responsibility for the welfare of all attendees. My first job was as a teacher at a Swiss boarding school. And chaperoning mixed groups of teenagers overnight was the worst: I was often the lone adult charged with preventing a dozen wily students from drinking, having sex or sneaking off at night.So, if the retreat organizer has decided to exclude the boys who made trouble on the last trip to send a strong message about inappropriate behavior (or because of limited resources for supervision), I find that reasonable. And I disagree with much of your position: You fail to acknowledge that the episode may have been frightening for some girls, even if nothing sexual happened. You are incorrect in stating that the girl is “the reason” for the boys’ punishment; the boys’ behavior is. And no girl is responsible for explaining to teenage boys why unwanted touching is wrong. That is your job!It sounds as if you have already made your pitch to the organization and it was rejected. So, rather than clinging to a minimizing “boys will be boys” argument, I suggest that you sit your son down to discuss the contours of appropriate behavior and the seriousness of unwanted touching.Miguel PorlanBefore ‘I Do,’ Try ‘I’ll Allow It’My partner and I plan to be married soon. I am child-free; he has five children from his previous marriage. He is close with all of them and has several grandchildren, ranging in age from 6 months to 21 years old. Both of my previous weddings were adult-only (17 and up), and I feel strongly about doing that again for our wedding and reception. But this would exclude some of my partner’s grandchildren, and he feels this would be insulting to his children. Advice?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trading Hope for Reality Helps Me Parent Through the Climate Crisis

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      When I gave birth to my first child, in 2019, it seemed like everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. He came out white and limp, his head dangling off to the side. People swarmed into the hospital room, trying to suction his lungs so he could breathe. Hours later, my husband and I stood in the NICU, looking down at this newborn baby, hooked up to wires and tubes.We had spent months talking about how to protect him from various harmful influences, and here we were, an hour out of the gate, dealing with a situation we hadn’t even considered. Had his brain been deprived of oxygen for too long? Would there be lifelong damage?That night in the hospital, I learned the first lesson of parenting: You are not in control of what is going to happen, nor can you predict it. This applies to your child’s personality, many of his choices and to some extent his health. It also applies to the growing threat of climate change.The climate crisis is bad and getting worse. Here in Oregon, we’ve endured several severe heat waves and wildfires in recent years. As the impacts compound, it’s clear a lot of people around the world — many of them children — are going to suffer and die.Globally, one in three children is exposed to deadly heat waves, and even more to unclean water. A study estimated wildfire smoke to be 10 times as harmful to children’s developing lungs as typical pollution. Researchers also concluded that nearly every child in the world is at risk from at least one climate-intensified hazard: extreme heat, severe storms and floods, wildfires, food insecurity and insect-borne diseases.If you are someone like me who has children and lies awake terrified for their future, you should not let hopelessness about climate change paralyze you. In fact, I would argue that right now the bravest thing to do — even braver than hoping — is to stop hoping.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Teens Are Getting Botox. I’m Going Full Crone in 2025.

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      Whenever I can, I try to deprogram my daughters from the overwhelming cultural imperative to look conventionally hot forever. Sometimes this involves showing my eldest daughter videos of women older than me who I admire. This is my way of pushing back against the idea that we should do everything in our power to look younger.A recent standout of the genre is a TikTok I found of Shirley Manson, the lead singer of the band Garbage, talking about being in her 50s. “I understand why women are scared to admit what age they are, but my feeling is that will never change until women change it,” she says, with her trademark blazing red hair pulled into a high, off-center ponytail, revealing a shaved undercut.My older daughter, who is in middle school, sat silently through the two-minute video. I thought she was deeply and mindfully considering Manson’s message, until she turned to me when it was over and said: “I hate her eye shadow.”Honestly, I get it. My older girl has always been able to sniff out a Very Important Maternal Lecture from 100 paces away, and because she’s inherited her mother’s innate skepticism, she rejects any of my overt attempts to indoctrinate her. I remember being in the middle school Thunderdome in the 1990s. If my mother had tried to talk to me then about beauty by showing me Joni Mitchell or whoever I would have laughed her off the face of the planet. Her entreaties would have been so irrelevant to my daily experience among tween insult comics — I was dishing it out as well as taking it, and an earnest call to hippie values would have been ridiculous to me.Normal preadolescent dismissal won’t deter me, because the pressure to look good in a hyper-conventional way is only getting worse and feels more overwhelming than it did when I was growing up. Women’s magazines don’t even seem to bother being mildly critical of plastic surgery or injections anymore, the wonky logic being that it’s anti-woman to be judgmental of anything a woman does. A recent article in The Cut about the “best” age to inject your face with the same toxin that causes botulism quotes a dermatologist who says, “I’m conservative by nature, so for Botox, I usually say late twenties at the earliest.”And the sad thing is that dermatologist is being conservative. In The Atlantic in September, Yasmin Tayag explained that “baby Botox” really is a thing: “The number of Americans ages 19 and under who got injections of Botox or similar products rose 75 percent from 2019 and 2022 — and then rose again in 2023.” Tayag then quotes another dermatologist who says, “There’s no age that’s too early,” before clarifying that it wouldn’t be appropriate to treat a teenager. Though as she also points out, when England banned fillers for the under-18 set, they simply traveled to Wales for treatment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More