The Kids Are Not Alright - by Jermaine Fowler

The Kids Are Not Alright

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You are sixty-three. You turned his room into an office the year he left for college, and the desk lasted four years before it went to the garage and the bed came back. Your son sleeps in it now, twenty-nine, his socked feet hanging off the end. The glow-in-the-dark stars you pressed to the ceiling when he was small still hang there, half of them peeled to a dull amber. You look in on him the way you used to.

Across town a daughter never left. Thirty-one, one address her whole life, she pays what she can and carries the trash to the curb on Tuesdays and keeps a brass key she has carried since she was ten. Her friends call her the lucky one. The word goes flat in her mouth.

This week, Realtor.com reported that 25.2 million adults under thirty-five lived with a parent in 2025. One in three. More than the pandemic year, more than any year on record.

What do you call a country where the one who finished the degree and the one who walked out of school both wake up under the same childhood ceiling?

Seventy percent of them work. A house that sold for its price in 2019 now lists a third higher, at a median of $430,000. Rent eats $1,673 of a month’s pay. To be married by thirty-one is a rarity now, where once it was the rule. The first-time buyer has aged to forty. In 1981 that buyer was twenty-nine, the age of the son in the twin bed, the age his mother was the year she bought the house he cannot leave.

The Keys

Hold half the wealth in the country in one set of hands and you have described the boomers, $83 trillion across a fifth of the people. Millennials and Gen Z together hold a tenth. Of every dollar in the stock market, fifty-four cents sit in their parents’ accounts; the children’s share is eight. Among the four-bedrooms, three in ten belong to boomers whose kids are long gone, and those kids, if they hold any deed at all, hold it on the cramped, vinyl-sided starter homes that almost never come up for sale.

Look at who writes the rules. No Congress since 1789 has been older than this one, the third-oldest on record, its Senate sitting just under sixty-five at the middle. Chuck Grassley has held his seat since 1981, the year the first-time buyer was twenty-nine, and he is ninety-one. Price a student loan, zone a city block, and odds are the gray-haired man doing it bought his first house under two hundred thousand in today’s money, paid it off, watched it quadruple, and pulled the ladder up behind him.

Old Hunger

In the old Greek telling, Cronus took the throne by taking a sickle to his own father, Uranus, and cutting from him the power to sire anything more. He never forgot how it was done. Warned that one of his own children would do the same to him, the Titan waited beside his sister-wife Rhea as each baby came, and he lifted the newborn while it was still slick with afterbirth and swallowed it whole. Hestia first. Then Demeter, then Hera, then Hades, then Poseidon. Five children down the throat of the father who made them, the small warm weight of each going still in the dark of him, and Rhea’s grief, the old poets say, would not be put down. When the sixth came due she wrapped a stone in swaddling and pressed it into his hands, and he weighed it and swallowed that too, and slept, and trusted the throne.

The poets called his reign the golden age. Golden for the ones already seated. He made sure it was the last, and that the gate locked behind him.

The newest gatekeeper has no face. A child is sorted by a machine that has no mouth, an AI screener that ranks his résumé and drops it in the time it takes to blink, one of six hundred stacked behind a single opening. Fed on a decade of who got hired before, it learned the old preferences and keeps them. It marks down the names that read as Black, the résumés that say women’s college, the bare months a mother stepped out to raise a child. In 2025 a Stanford team tested these screeners with identical résumés and found the same one scored higher under a gray-haired man’s name than under a youth’s.

What They Built

Kids cannot read, they say. Cannot sit still, cannot hold a page, freeze at the first hard thing and reach for the phone. This year the New York Post ran it as fact: Gen Z, “the first generation dumber than the last.” A neuroscientist told the paper they score lower than their parents did at the same age, lower on memory and reading and focus, and that they are too sure of themselves to notice. Offered a lesson in how the hands of a clock move, a young man shrugs, no thanks, not if he doesn’t have to, and his teacher carries the story home like a wound.

Older than the clock, the blame. Aristotle wrote that the young think they know everything and are always quite sure of it. Two thousand years on, the Earl of Shaftesbury rose in the House of Commons in 1843 and called the children of England “a fearful multitude of untutored savages,” boys with dogs at their heels and every mark of dissolute habits, girls who “drive coal-carts, ride astride upon horses, drink, swear, fight, smoke, whistle, and care for nobody,” and handed down the verdict every elder hands down: “the morals of children are tenfold worse than formerly.” In 1993 the Washington Post ran a column titled “The Boring Twenties.” This, the writer said, was “the first generation in American history to live so well and complain so bitterly about it.”

Live so well. Those twenty-somethings are the forty-year-old first-time buyers of now, the ones who waited until the gray came in to sign a mortgage, and their children are the ones asleep in the twin beds.

Not all of them kept the rules. One left school in the second year when the tuition outran the loans. He frames houses now, Carhartt-wearing and steel-toed, raw-knuckled in the cold, eleven dollars over the minimum, and the one-bedroom in town still takes almost half of what he clears. Whether he finished, the rent does not ask; whether he finished, the software does not read before it drops him. Welder and dropout and honors graduate stand at the same locked door. The same people who built that door now call the welder lazy, the dropout a warning, the graduate spoiled, and themselves, somehow, the ones who earned the key.

A screen cost less than a sitter, and the sitter cost more than the second job cleared, and the second job was the rent. He was nine the year his school's budget lost at the ballot. He did not set the price of the house, or the price of the degree, or build the machine waiting at the end of both. The people who did all of this are the ones shaking their heads now.

Every old generation holds the same two things in its hands: a key it could pass down, and a lock it could turn instead. Cronus turned the lock. So did the man who priced the house and called the knocking laziness.

The Disgorging

In the old story the swallowed come back up. Rhea brews a bitter draught that turns the father’s stomach, and he heaves them out one after another, grown now and alive, the gray stone clattering onto the ground first. The wealth comes back too. Passing from the old hands to the young by 2048, something near $124 trillion will be the largest disgorging the country has recorded. It comes late, after the bedroom years burn off, after the children who never got born. Money is the reason, say forty-three percent of adults who will not have a child; not wanting one, say twenty-two. They want them. The price reached them first. Out of Toronto, a study lays half the drop in the birthrate on the cost of a place to live.

Cronus kept the throne the poets called the golden age. He kept it to the end. No one was left he had not swallowed, and no one was left to hand it to.

The son sleeps under the fallen stars. The daughter keeps a brass key to a door that was never hers. Neither will buy the house he grew up in. Neither, on this ledger, will build the room a child of his own might sleep in. The inheritance is coming. It comes the morning the hand that holds it goes cold, to whoever outlived the wait, and a third of them are waiting in the room where they learned to walk.

We are building historical literacy here, the ability to see the pattern as it is being written in real time and the thing that makes you harder to lie to at a moment when the lies are coming faster than most people can track. If you are reading this and recognizing the pattern, you are not the only one, and the community of people doing that work with you is part of what this is.

Writing and researching these pieces takes 8 to 12 hours each, all of it done by me down to the footnotes, and I cannot continue this work without your paid support. So much information is locked behind paywalls now, and I want to keep this work open to the public. Those who pay keep it free and open so it can reach everyone who needs it.

Notes & Sources

The Open

  1. Realtor.com, June 2026: a record 25.2 million adults under 35 lived with a parent in 2025, one in three, surpassing the pandemic peak. Realtor.com Report

  2. Same report: 70% employed, $430,000 median list price (up 34.4% from 2019), $1,673 median rent (up 17.9%), 90% never married. Realtor.com Report

  3. NAR: the typical first-time buyer is now 40, an all-time high; first-time buyers are 21% of the market, lowest since record-keeping began in 1981. NAR Report

The Keys

  1. Visual Capitalist (UBS/Federal Reserve data): boomers hold $83.3 trillion, over half of U.S. household wealth, at a fifth of the population; millennials and Gen Z together hold 10.5%. Visual Capitalist

  2. Fortune (Fed data via Motley Fool): boomers hold 54% of stocks to millennials’ 8%; boomers occupy nearly three in ten large homes.

  3. Fortune Article

  4. NBC News analysis: the 119th Congress is the third-oldest since 1789, its Senate near 65 at the median. NBC News Analysis

  5. Library of Congress (CRS): Chuck Grassley, born 1933, has held his seat since 1981 and is 91. Library of Congress

Old Hunger

  1. Hesiod, Theogony 453–467: Cronus, having castrated Uranus with a sickle, swallows each child at birth — Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon — fearing a son will overthrow him; “grief seized Rhea.” Hesiod's Theogony

  2. Brookings, 2025: AI résumé screeners show bias against names signaling Black and female identity. Brookings Report

  3. MIT Sloan: AI tools penalize employment gaps and downgrade Black and women’s colleges; Amazon’s 2018 tool penalized “women’s.” MIT Sloan

  4. Stanford Report, October 2025: AI screeners gave older men the highest ratings on identical résumés (study published in Nature). Stanford Report

What They Built

  1. New York Post, Feb 2026: neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath’s claim that Gen Z scores lower than the generation before. New York Post Article

  2. Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II: the young “think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.” Aristotle's Rhetoric

  3. The 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, House of Commons, February 28, 1843, on “a fearful multitude of untutored savages.” Earl of Shaftesbury

  4. The Washington Post, “The Boring Twenties,” September 12, 1993. Washington Post Article

The Disgorging

  1. Hesiod, Theogony 485–500: Rhea feeds Cronus a stone in swaddling in place of Zeus; the grown Zeus forces the disgorging. Hesiod's Theogony

  2. Cerulli Associates (June 2025): $124 trillion passes to younger generations by 2048, the top 2% accounting for half. Cerulli Associates

  3. BYU College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences, 2025 American Family Survey: 43% cite “insufficient money” as the primary barrier to children, against 22% citing desire. BYU Survey

  4. Benjamin Couillard (University of Toronto), “Build, Baby, Build: How Housing Shapes Fertility”: housing costs since 1990 drive 51% of the fertility decline between the 2000s and 2010s. Toronto Study