‘Thanks, Mum, but I don’t want your life’ – is the load that buckled their mothers putting off Gen Z?

For at least a couple of decades, Professor Leah Ruppanner has been captivated by a problem weighing on working mothers. It’s one which threatens to sink them – and sometimes does.

What is this stubborn phenomenon that confines so many to what the veteran sociologist describes as perpetual, high-functioning burnout?

Thousands of women have told Ruppanner that, coupled with employment and the physical job of child-rearing, the “mental load” of running a contemporary family is buckling them.

Mental load covers the invisible but inevitable tasks of anticipating and covering everyone in the family’s care needs: the thinking of, planning, remembering and checking everything, including birthdays, Christmas, doctor’s appointments, school WhatsApp groups, special events and much more.

Australian fathers are doing more hands-on care of their children, as per 2024 research by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, which found that just over one in three couple-families share it equally. But societal norms still assume the cognitive work of family management is predominantly mothers’, even if they are fully employed.

Mothers of 2026 typically work more paid hours than their predecessors, do more domestic chores than male partners, and are also still primarily responsible for what has European academics have labelled the “third shift” (the “second shift” being physical domestic work).

The open-ended nature of this makes it “a job with working conditions no union would approve”, Ruppanner quips. But quite apart from the individual impact, the societal consequences are serious.

As the federal government worries over the nation’s all-time low birth rate and what it means to an economy with a shrinking workforce and rising demand on social services, Ruppanner’s new book, Drained, suggests the combined load of 2020s motherhood is putting young women off.

“We wonder why birth rates are down even in countries with robust social supports and pro-natalist policies,” writes Ruppanner, founding director of Melbourne University’s Future of Work Lab. “As someone who has studied all these things, I’ve come to a startling conclusion: the mental load is at the heart of the problem.”

‘Feeling an inch away from complete breakdown is near universal.’

Professor Leah Ruppanner, Future of Work lead, University of Melbourne

Reaction to a recent Instagram post on ABC Lifestyle suggests she is right. It asked: “Working mums: What are your secrets to juggling work with drop-off and pick-up and the extracurricular activities? How do you manage school holidays?”

That this reinforced the notion this nation-wide challenge is mothers’ problem to solve drew 900-plus disappointed comments. The response: “We aren’t [managing]. We are all completely burnt out” received 3182 likes.

Monash University academic Dr Stephanie Westacott commented: “When we ask ‘working mums’ for tips on doing it all, we suggest that women should be doing it all …

“Parents need genuine sharing of domestic and emotional labour, workplaces that don’t penalise care, and we all need to shift away from the idea that women’s competence is measured by how well they absorb impossible loads,” she wrote, attracting 1132 likes.

Ruppanner writes that it is precisely this challenge leaving 2020s mothers feeling run “ragged, judged and constantly fragmented” – all in the name of helping them reject at least some expectations.

“In a culture that asks women, especially mothers, to be everything to everyone at all moments in time, the experience of feeling scattered, distracted and an inch away from complete breakdown is near universal,” she says.

Younger women witness this, says Professor Kate Huppatz, a Western Sydney University sociologist and expert in gender, labor, care and work. She believes it is influencing their life choices.

“I suspect younger women are being turned off motherhood as a result of watching their own mothers struggle to manage the contradictions of motherhood,” says Huppatz, director of research at the University of Western Sydney’s school of social sciences.

“These contradictions are, of course, a consequence of conflicting expectations of women (at work and home) and inadequate structures and policies to support caregiving. But young people see the emotional and personal consequences and think ‘that’s not for me’.”

American culture writer and podcaster Anne Helen Petersen last year gave a name to this phenomenon: observing their elders’ trajectory towards exhaustion had created the sentiment, “Mom, that sucks – I don’t want your life”.

Huppatz says that in the absence of further progress on gender equity issues, such as provision of accessible childcare and reduction of the pay-gap, young women may believe traditional domestic arrangements “are all that is possible”.

Her recently published book, Motherhood Labour and Care in the 21st Century, co-edited with human resources lecturer Dr Sheree Gregory, describes how the ongoing vogue for “intensive motherhood” means the role continues to carry “tensions, ambivalence and contradictions”.

“The norms of good motherhood continue to be pernicious, limiting the practices and identities available to mothers,” they write.

That more Gen Z men than Gen Z women say they want to become parents can in part be put down to the “impossible” ask on mothers, Huppatz and others say. This so-called “cluck gap” was identified in 2024 data from the Pew Research Centre, which found 57 per cent of men aged 18 to 35 wanted children compared with 45 per cent of similar aged women.

Young women understand that the workforce structure reinforces gender norms, meaning they will probably need to opt out of work if they want children as fathers’ mainly higher paid jobs continue to be prioritised.

That women’s work tends to take lower priority caused a sharp spike in maternal stress and distress during the pandemic, when many mothers found they needed to work plus manage children while men continued to work without visible disruption. This problem became so stressful that the New York Times opened a popular “primal scream” line for mothers to call and vent their anguish.

On top of the need for two incomes to support a regular Australian mortgage ($736,257 as of early 2026) women know childcare is often excessively expensive or unavailable, social supports for mothers have diminished and most unpaid family labor will still fall on them, Huppatz says.

Australian men are still more likely to be presumed to be “unencumbered” by employers than women and are often reluctant to use their on-paper parenting entitlements for fear of workplace judgment.

“Women are saying, ‘I don’t want to carry that load’,” she says. “I don’t want to opt out and make those compromises.”

Analysing the gender “cluck gap” on news and opinion website Vox , Millennial parenting writer Anna North recently summarised young women’s lower enthusiasm as influenced by them surveying the landscape and concluding that motherhood “starts to look like a bad deal”.

Their level of education is on par with men’s, and they expect to pull in about half the family income, but they worry they will end up with more than half the childcare and more than half of the “work on the home front” – Ruppaner’s infamous mental load.

“It’s never been more costly for women to have a child,” North said on a February podcast. Her colleague Rachel Cohen Booth, a savvy Millennial who penned viral 2023 article How Millennials Learned to Dread Motherhood, also identified many influential factors.

“College-educated millennial women considering motherhood — and a growing number from Gen Z too — are now so well versed in the statistics of modern maternal inequity that we can recite them as if we’d already experienced them ourselves,” wrote Cohen Booth.

”We can speak authoritatively about the burden of “the mental load” in heterosexual relationships, the chilling costs of child care … We’re so informed, frankly, that we find ourselves feeling less like empowered adults than like grimacing fortune-tellers peering into a crystal ball.”

Writing her article, Cohen Booth confessed she was also weighing up whether to have a baby with her partner (who was keen). Having digested a mountain of data, she concluded that the state was not entirely at fault for the baby bust – it also had plenty to with in-couple expectations on women.

“We can’t ignore that it’s domestic inequality between partners – or the perception of it – that drives much of a mother’s emotional and romantic dissatisfaction, according to research,” she said.

In 2024, the federal government’s Centre for Population issued a paper titled Fertility decline in Australia: Is it here to stay? and concluded that external forces, as well as social practices, were strong determinants of family formation intentions and of family size choices.

“Although the factors in fertility decline are highly complex and interconnected, increases in female education, labour force participation, housing market changes and changes in social norms and values have contributed to the decline,” it noted.

Professor Elizabeth Hill, co-convenor of the Australian work and family policy roundtable, says women are particularly tuned in the obvious factors: the total cost of having a child, housing accessibility, secure work, affordable childcare and other services come up in her research.

“All those things had an impact on how many children our sample of Australian workers [1000 women and 1000 men] planned to have … women were significantly more likely to be influenced by those factors and more focused on the ‘will I/won’t I’ question than men,” she said.

Hill said it was notable that her team’s 2019 research showed once young men had their first child, they were far more switched on to what is required to combine work and care, and their expectations aligned strongly with similar-aged women’s.

But given the reported influence of “manosphere” values on family gender roles since, and as young women’s political leanings are documented to be shifting to the left while young men’s shift to the right, Hill is not certain the study’s finding will be sustained.

As for one-time motherhood agnostic, the journalist Rachel Cohen Booth, she concluded her widely shared analysis of motherhood dread by advising readers to “have the courage to reject the all-encompassing crisis frame” around motherhood.

Just over two years later, the author had her first child, posting sweet pictures on her Substack in April. His name is Jesse Zachary Booth.

• This masthead is preparing a project examining what is behind the ongoing decline in the Australian birth rate. Tell us what is influencing your choices on parenthood or family size by emailing: bgossling@nine.com.au