MEET THE PARENNIALS

As millennials enter parenthood, Amelia Lester examines their attitudes to parenting and family roles, and their concerns and hopes for their children’s future. Art direction by Mandy Alex. Photographed by Edward Urrutia.

What are millennials’ attitudes to parenting and their hopes for their children’s future?

When news broke last year that then 20-year-old Kylie Jenner was expecting a child, no-one seemed more shocked than her peers. Lena Dunham, whose alter ego Hannah Horvath once declared herself “the voice of a generation”, tweeted that the news was confronting for many of her 30-year-old contemporaries: “A solid 10 friends texted me triggered by Kylie pregnancy. I’m like: ‘Ladies she’s 20. We were all v fertile then, we were just broke.’” A few months later, Dunham would announce her struggle with endometriosis had led to a voluntary hysterectomy at 31, but she had hit on a demographic truth: millennials, born between about 1980 and 2000, are delaying childbirth longer than ever before. According to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average age of first-time mothers in 1980 was 22.7; in 2013, it was 26. The trend is similar in Australia, moving up from 28.1 in 2005 to 28.9 in 2015. Forty per cent of Australian millennials are now dealing with parenthood, but the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported in 2015 that just 15 per cent of births that year were to women under 25.

Sarah Renzi Sanders, who is 32, is an artist living outside Washington, D.C. Like Jenner, she bucked millennial stereotypes by having her first child at 20. She was a university student at the time and felt out of synch with her cohort. “I lost a lot of friends,” she says. “People were literally having parties in my apartment while I was trying to sleep.” Renzi Sanders nonetheless graduated on schedule. Today, she’s raising her three children with husband Austin Sanders, 33, a commercial real estate broker; they married shortly after the birth of their eldest, Adelaide.

Spending time with the Sanders, I am struck by the ease with which they parent – even with their two-year-old, Wallace. After a weekend with them at the beach recently, I commented to my husband on how strikingly low-key they were about the kids compared with other parents we know. “Well, they’ve had a lot of practice,” he pointed out.

Austin and Sarah don’t sugarcoat the experience of having children young – they cite making ends meet and keeping their marriage together as the biggest challenges – but they are also thankful for the powerful connection it engendered. “I see that a lot of my friends struggle to give up their free time and their independence, but we never had boozy brunches and shopping dates to begin with,” says Renzi Sanders. At a 34th birthday party a few weeks back, Austin noticed how many of the young children in attendance were plugged into iPads or entranced by their parents’ phones. “I get that people want to have time with friends and not manage the child, but you don’t get any socialisation that way,” he says. “To be able to have the energy to emotionally connect [as younger parents] makes things so much easier.”

Still, the Sanders are not your average millennial parents, and nor is Kylie Jenner. Jenner’s half-sister Khloé Kardashian, who gave birth earlier this year to her first child at 33, is a more typical case, statistically speaking. Actually, because Khloé is unmarried, Kim Kardashian West might be the most representative of that clan, because two of her

three children – all born in her 30s – arrived in wedlock. It turns out millennials, while putting off the experience of starting families, are surprisingly traditional when it comes to what their families look like. Helen Fisher, a professor of biological anthropology and consultant to dating website Match.com, calls the juxtaposition of casual sexual liaisons and long-simmering committed relationships amongst millennials “fast sex, slow love”. Because of this conservative approach, it is predicted that about 60 per cent of the children of millennials will be born to married parents.

Just as they prefer to wait until marriage for children, there’s also some evidence that millennial parents maintain a surprisingly traditional division of paid work, childcare and household maintenance. A fascinating study conducted by the advocacy group Young Invincibles, based on US census data, shows that millennial mums spend, on average, about twice the time that fathers do on both childcare and household maintenance. This is at odds with what both men and women say would be the ideal arrangement: in a 2011 Pew Research survey, 72 per cent of millennials agreed that ‘husband and wife should both have jobs and take care of the house and children’, compared with 63 per cent of Gen Xers (born 1960 to 1980), and 59 per cent of Baby Boomers (born 1946 on).

Why the discrepancy? Millennials are a generation of hustlers; as 25-year-old mother-to-be Cardi B says:

“I make money moves.” Pew notes that they are the first generation in modern history to have higher poverty rates and lower incomes than their two preceding generations. In Australia, the news is almost as dire. Roger Wilkins, a professor of economics at the University of Melbourne, explains that while wages are flat in real terms, for new entrants to the labour market, wages are declining. At the same time, permanent part-time jobs are growing. “This is the rise of underemployment,” he says, “and that’s affecting Gen Y” – another name for millennials – “more than anybody.”

Bernard Salt is the demographer who went viral around the world with his Australian column about millennials spending too much money on avocado toast and not saving enough. He has written that the double-income yuppie parents of millennials, themselves raised in the 1950s and 60s by the precepts of Depression austerity, “measured their own success as parents by how much they could give their Gen Y kids”. Now, as millennials become parents themselves, Salt predicts a decade of intergenerational tension between the two groups based on their comparative economic situations. As young people turn to more flexible workplace arrangements in the gig economy, a lot will also become dependent on their parents. A Deloitte survey reflects Australian millennials’ doom and gloom, with only 39 per cent believing they will be better off than their parents, compared with 51 per cent globally.

Yet the conflict Salt predicted has not necessarily eventuated. In fact, many millennials I’ve spoken to are teaming up with their parents, and in some cases, structuring their decisions around starting a family to make that outcome possible. Eloise Milthorpe, a 36-year-old in health service planning, grew up in the Blue Mountains and moved back from Sydney once she and her husband, Will, had their first child. It was in part to be close to her mother and sister, but there were other draws, too. “When I was pregnant, we were quite happy in our two-bedroom apartment in the city,” Milthorpe says. “Property prices really sold it for Will, but there’s a beautiful sense of community here, and we want that for our kids.” Now that their son, James, is three, and daughter Amy is two, Milthorpe is extra appreciative of the slower pace of life. “We’re not living on busy roads and all the kids in the neighbourhood can go out and play without us having to worry,” she says.

The way Milthorpe talked about her shift to the mountains reminded me of another couple who relocated to start a family. Phil and Ashley Carter, both 33, met while they were both living in San Francisco. When I ask Phil how he conceived of his role as dad to daughter Kinley, who is 17 months old, he answers by explaining the decision to move back to Ashley’s home state of Colorado. “San Francisco is still my favourite city on the planet, but we looked into our future and saw what our lives would look like if we stayed versus what we could do for our family in Colorado,” he says. “Our decision was largely driven by our desire to start a family, be close to Ashley’s parents, and have more balance and flexibility in our lives. That’s what’s important to me as a father,” he adds.

Moving from one of the most expensive places in the world to a regional area has had beneficial effects on the Carters’ work/life balance. Since giving birth, Ashley has adopted a more flexible schedule, while Phil has recently left his position at an e-commerce app to work full time on his passion project, a social media start-up called Empath, which he describes as “Fitbit for feelings”. Ashley says her parents “love being grandparents” and the extra time she’s gained with Phil means they haven’t had to “completely sacrifice our marriage”.

There’s another benefit to escaping the city, which is that Kinley is growing up in a more traditional environment. Both Ashley and Phil speak often about the importance of exposing her to the outdoors; the word ‘community’ also comes up a lot. “We go to church and hope that Kinley feels loved there,” Ashley says. “But beyond broad brushstrokes we haven’t talked about being really prescriptive or overly structured in terms of her time.”

An influential Ad Week story from last year summarised the shift in parenting style from Baby Boomers to millennials as ‘helicopter parents’ to ‘passenger plane parents’. Boomers, trend analyst Sarah Holmes wrote, were “hyper-focused on their children, often at the cost of their own interests”, while millennials take a “collaborative, inclusive approach” which considers the needs of the family as a whole.

Alicia Mollaun Bartlett, a 37-year-old international advisor for the Australian Public Service, isn’t familiar with the term ‘passenger plane parents’, but sees echoes in how she is raising her son Evatt, who is two. “I’d call it slow parenting, simplicity parenting, and one of its important elements is not scheduling your kid too much,” she says. “Lots of kids do gymnastics one day and daycare three days a week and swimming on the weekend, and two-year-olds don’t need to do that much stuff.”

At least one morning each week, or even a whole day, is quarantined for family. “If a kid’s party falls during that time,” she says, “we won’t go.” Mollaun Bartlett is also concerned with reducing Evatt’s exposure

Millennials, while putting off the experience of starting families, are surprisingly traditional when it comes to what their families look like

to plastics and processed foods – another big change from her own childhood, during which dinner was usually a kid’s meal eaten in front of the television. She recalls that her son’s diet has sometimes been hard to explain to others. “People will say: ‘Oh, kids can have a sausage, and I’m thinking sausages are probably the worst thing you can give a kid.’” In addition to breastfeeding, which she plans to continue until Evatt is around three, Mollaun Bartlett and her husband focus on feeding their son whole foods. One of Evatt’s favourites, she says, is avocado toast with ‘sprinkles’, which are nutritional yeast and sesame seeds.

During Mollaun Bartlett’s extended maternity leave, she took an online course called Low Tox Life, run by Sydney-based environmental evangelist Alexx Stuart. Through the course, Mollaun Bartlett learnt that everything from doonas to school shorts contain hidden chemicals: “We had to specify to aunties and uncles that we only wanted wooden toys, which was quite difficult because they wouldn’t listen and kept giving us plastic ones.” Mollaun Bartlett says this philosophy is sometimes called ‘natural parenting’. I suggest it could also be dubbed ‘what would nana do?’, and she doesn’t disagree.

Of course, one big difference with nana’s era is that parents these days must contend with technology, and specifically smartphones. Everyone I spoke to expressed a desire to delay their children’s exposure for as long as possible, but the Sanders’ lived experience suggests this is harder to pull off than it sounds – 11-year-old Adelaide is one of the only kids in her class without a phone.

Parents of daughters seem especially anxious about the psychological effects of social media on young brains. Phil Carter, who is himself a social media entrepreneur, says: “For young women in particular, I think it can be really difficult to have a balanced perspective on life when people are curating a perfect image of themselves on social media all the time.” Sarah Renzi Sanders sees Adelaide’s peers “scrolling through Instagram with the highlight reel of their life and it’s not good for anyone’s self- esteem”.

Although the science is still not settled on the longterm effects of smartphone use, especially among adolescents, the Australian Department of Health’s latest screen time guidelines for infants are crystal clear: none for children under two, and no more than an hour a day until five. The TV is no longer an acceptable babysitter for the very young – but what about Facetiming with grandparents? Or goofing around with silly Snapchat filters? It’s all part of being the ‘first’ generation to grapple with a seismic shift in how we relate to one another.

In terms of technology use by millennial parents, there are still more quandaries, and they start early: do we post a birth announcement on Facebook? What about on a public Instagram account? And is it okay to share that hilarious video of our bundle of joy splashing in the bath? Celebrities grapple with this in the public eye. For every Zoë Foster Blake, who is happy to share photos of her two children with her 650,000+ followers, or Chrissy Teigen, with 18.3 million, there’s an Adele, who has never shared a picture of her son, or Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis, who keep their family snaps on a private account.

On the flip side, the internet can also be a source of knowledge and comfort for millennial parents – and may even contribute to their confidence in their parenting skills, which is higher than for previous generations. A Pew survey revealed that 57 per cent of millennial mums say they are doing a very good job as a parent, compared with 48 per cent of Gen Xers and 41 per cent of Boomers. This is no doubt partly because they are, on average, older and more settled in their careers by the time motherhood comes around, but it could also be because of the abundance of information online to which they have access.

At the time of writing there are 215 million hits for a Google search on ‘parenting advice’. “The good news is that parents know more about child development than ever before,” says Rebecca Parlakian, program director for family research group Zero to Three to the Washington Post. “Google is the new grandparent, the new neighbour, the new nanny.”

Preparing for the birth of my first child as your typical mid30s control freak, I asked my mum where she had gone for parenting advice back when there was no internet. “My friends and I all used Dr Spock for his chapters on crying and rashes, and I had a Mothercare book which had a good ‘troubleshooting’ section at the back,” she texted me back. (Like most millennials, I am allergic to the phone.) “But there was nothing like the array of books and information now available as you have.”

This can, of course, be a double- edged sword: Dawn Barker, a child psychiatrist, recently wrote an essay on Quartz titled ‘Even I Look for Parenting Advice Online’ in which she wrote about the downside of relying too heavily on ‘Dr Google’. Mothers today are “typically older at the birth of their first child, and while this may mean more financial stability and life skills … the loss of control over a woman’s life – an inevitability with a baby – can be challenging.” She went on: “For women who have been successful in other aspects of their life, failing to live up to being a textbook mother, by not having a textbook baby, can be very challenging, triggering the obsession to ‘fix’ the problem rather than relaxing into parenthood.”

Michelle Kennedy, 35, felt that loss of independence acutely when she became a mother to her now fiveyear-old son, Fin. Kennedy tells me on the phone from her home in London that she felt very lonely a lot of the time. “Being the first in my group of friends to have a kid meant that even if you manage to go out for dinner and try to be the old version of you, your friends are saying: ‘I slept with this guy last night’ while I’m like: ‘I did a dream feed.’”

A successful tech entrepreneur who had climbed high at the dating app Bumble, Kennedy also felt adrift professionally as she took on a radically new identity. “We’re told as women we can do anything and be anything, but I felt completely unprepared for where motherhood was meant to fit in with my life plan.” That experience inspired Kennedy to found Peanut, an app that connects mothers in the same way Bumble or Tinder does for dates. Peanut, which launched in Australia in July last year, now has more than 350,000 users, predominantly young professionals.

“Looking back on those early days, motherhood was really scary and lonely,” Kennedy says. In particular, she was worried about being judged for desperately wanting to go back to work after six months of maternity leave. “But now more people are talking about it,” she says, “and I realised doing it your own way doesn’t make you a bad mum.”

“We’re told as women we can do anything and be anything, but I felt unprepared for where motherhood was meant to fit in with my life plan”