# The spiritual vacuum facing Generation Z

**By:** Ruadhan Jones  
**Published:** 2026-08-05T06:00:00.000Z  
**Source:** [The Catholic Herald](https://thecatholicherald.com/article/the-spiritual-vacuum-facing-generation-z)

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Ruadhan Jones

Debate continually rumbles on about complacent Boomers and complaining Gen Zers, and over whether young people are worse off than preceding generations. Most commentary focuses on socio-economic factors, such as the housing crisis, relative wages and so forth. One area that is often overlooked, however, is the moral and spiritual vacuum handed on to Gen Z by their parents, who include Boomers, Generation X and some Millennials.
Young people today have been left unmoored by a generation of parents who refused to take up their responsibility to direct their children. In offering love in the wrong ways, these parents paved the way for a society that distrusts authority, having never been offered a healthy model of it.
My evidence to support this claim is more anecdotal than the socio-economic arguments, drawn from conversations with my peers, teachers, priests and parents. For instance, a teacher once observed to me the ways in which parents failed to express love for their children appropriately. They would carry their child’s bag to the gate for them, but they would not help with homework in the evenings. Or they would lavish their child with gifts and gadgets but never enquire about the child’s day at school.
These are minor details in the moment, but over time they build up a picture for a child of a parent who is – rather like the modern state – little more than a convenient provider of funds and infrastructure, with some minor responsibilities and expectations tacked on. For the parent, meanwhile, it is a very convenient relationship, as it absolves them of the grave moral and spiritual responsibility to direct their child.
Perhaps the most extreme form of this unwillingness to exercise parental responsibility is the trend of raising your child “gender-neutral”. This is a very serious abuse of the parent’s position, in my view. Children crave boundaries, both physical and metaphysical. At the start, the boundaries are almost entirely related to physical dangers, but as the child matures, metaphysical boundaries become more significant.
Hence the challenging “why” phase, which forces a parent to think about everything he or she simply takes for granted. Hence also the period of discovery when a child notices that mother is a girl and father is a boy. In trying to find out what things are and why they are that way, a child is attempting to find his place in the world. He is craving the type of boundaries that will guide and direct him for the rest of his life, nurturing his vocation as a mother or a father, a priest or a Religious, whatever it may be.
But for so many people parenting isn’t understood in this way, as a duty to be discharged in accordance with our nature. Instead, children have become another commodity in an increasingly consumerist age. It is interesting to read accounts of why someone did or did not become a parent. You begin to pick up a common theme: “I do – or do not – need children to lead a fulfilling life.”
Back in the 1970s, the parents of Gen Z were being influenced by a significant cultural force: punk, which emphasised a radical vision of self-empowerment. Looking at the likes of Ziggy Stardust and a whole host of pop icons, they conceived the notion that you could choose who you wanted to be. Raised with the secure foundations offered by the “safe European home” so despised by the punks, but not recognising the existence of these foundations, they thought life was a blank pad on to which you inscribed your desires. They rejected the foundations – which were already crumbling – and accelerated the breakdown of family life.
Children became a choice, just another possible path to personal satisfaction, rather than a duty that we fulfil in accordance with the longing God has placed in our hearts to be fathers and mothers. In other words, parenthood is no longer seen as a vocation integral to our nature as men and women; it is another product we trade on the market of experience.
Little wonder, then, that the relationship between parent and child becomes distorted, or that this distorted view of the first society we experience is reflected in the culture of our local and national communities. Being unwilling to discipline their own desires and wants, parents have indulged their children, offering them friendship instead of love, rootless freedom instead of an authority grounded in truth, goodness and beauty.
So we find ourselves with a generation grasping for a firm foundation in the world, but without the wisdom a parent is meant to offer. As a friend once admitted, he didn’t believe that fulfilment could be achieved through leading a good life; happiness to him is just a series of fleeting material experiences, amplified by your drug of choice.
What other lesson could he learn from a generation that had ripped up the already fragile roots of family and social life?