Choosing To Fail:

Will My Grandkids Ever Have Grandkids?

The girls were over for solstice dinner last night. Tami’s granddaughters, seventeen and fourteen now. Victoria arrived in gothy black makeup and a little black dress, already checking her phone, halfway to a second party at her boyfriend’s house. Alexis helped me mix drinks behind the kitchen counter.

I love those girls fiercely. They add something to my life I didn’t know was missing.

They’re not my biological grandchildren. I never had kids of my own. See, I was past thirty before I ever had employment that wasn’t basically a shit job. By the time I had stable work, health insurance, any reasonable expectation that I could provide for a family - the window had closed. That’s not tragedy, just math. The economic math of my generation, which has only gotten worse.

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I read an article this week about Americans choosing to keep pets, instead of children. The numbers are stark: pet ownership costs rose 25% in two years while wages grew 3%. But that’s still cheaper than the traditional alternative. It now costs over $300,000 to raise a child to eighteen. Meanwhile, the pet economy has swelled to $157 billion annually, and Gen Z owners are going into debt for their animals - spending $6,000 a year on a dog they can afford instead of a child they can’t.

The author called this “a bleak indication of Americans’ growing disinterest in human community.”

But that’s not what I see. People haven’t lost interest in nurturing. They’ve been priced out of it. The biological drive to care for dependents doesn’t disappear when children become unaffordable. It redirects. A golden retriever is not a substitute for a son or a daughter, but it’s what the economy will allow.

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Years ago, a history professor told me something I’ve never forgotten: “Any society has to make sure that young men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-nine are busy with jobs and babies. A society that chooses to ignore this simple truth is a society that is going to fail, catastrophically.”

Jobs and babies. That’s it. Meaningful work and family formation. The two things that channel human energy into building and maintaining a civilization rather than tearing it down or checking out entirely.

We’re failing at both. Not by accident. By design. We’ve built an economy that treats housing as an investment vehicle, healthcare as a profit center, education as a debt trap, and child-rearing as a hobby. Something you do in your spare time, at your own expense, while also working a job that might pay you enough to keep living under a roof and eating food.

We pay people to trade derivatives, write ad copy, and optimize engagement metrics. But the person raising the next generation of humans? That’s not *real* work. That’s not valued work. That’s the thing young parents are supposed to figure out on their own, usually by driving themselves to exhaustion and bankruptcy.

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I got lucky. I threaded through a narrowing window - landed federal employment with a pension and health insurance. Found Tami, with her teacher’s retirement and her granddaughters and her garden. We paid off our little homestead. We’ll be okay.

But I watch those girls growing up in a world where the cost of having children is rising eight times faster than wages. Where the path I stumbled onto - stable employment with benefits, affordable housing, a partner you can build something with - has become nearly impassable for their generation.

Victoria’s graduating this spring, stepping into the economy I’ve been describing. Alexis has a knack for mixing drinks - she might make a good living as a bartender someday.

That’s the quiet recalibration, isn’t it? The way expectations adjust to what the economy will allow.

I haven’t had a lot of conversations with them about what comes after high school. Honestly, just getting them to graduation has sometimes felt like pushing a stone up a mountain. That’s what it takes to raise kids now, even when you’re the step-grandfather showing up with love and a paid-off homestead and whatever stability you can offer. It’s still exhausting. It still takes everything.

And I find myself wondering: Will they ever get to have this? Will Victoria, in her cute black dress and her polite kind hurry to be somewhere else, ever sit in a kitchen someday while her own grandchildren argue about nothing? Will Alexis mix drinks for her daughter’s family at a solstice dinner thirty or forty years from now?

Will my grandkids ever have grandkids?

I desperately want to live in a society that treats the care and education of the next generation as its most important work.

Because without that, everything else is irrelevant.