Conservative Young Women Flip the Script: Kids First, Then Career

For generations of women, the logic has seemed airtight: Focus on a career in your 20s, and worry about starting a family once you are established in a job.

This mindset has catapulted women into higher-earning positions, and into traditionally male-dominated fields.

The share of women in their prime working years who are in the workforce is around a record high. And women are having babies later, if they have them at all. The answer to fertility constraints, they’re told, is egg freezing.

Isabel Brown , 28, didn’t want to wait. She married last year and had a baby this year. She’s now building her career as a conservative activist, hosting a podcast for conservative media company the Daily Wire and speaking on college campuses as a representative for Turning Point, the youth organisation Charlie Kirk co-founded.

Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk , now leads the organisation and is amplifying a message especially resonant for young conservative women: Family is central. Children come first.

“Young people are realising that our lives are going to be so much more meaningful if we have a family to share our success with from the start,” Brown said. She and other conservative women talk about timing family and work as “seasons” of life.

The term is from the biblical passage Ecclesiastes 3:1: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”

Many of the women who view their lives in this way say they think of themselves as existing in between the extremes of tradwives (who treat caring for their homes and families as a more permanent, full-time job) and girlbosses (who centre their lives around work).

As recently as 15 years ago, self-described conservative and liberal women between the ages of 18 and 35 were having children at around the same rate, according to an analysis from a large national study called the General Social Survey by Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma.

But in recent years, the gap has widened, his analysis shows. As of 2024, roughly 75% of liberal women in this age range were childless, compared with around 40% of conservatives. In 2010, the difference was only 5 percentage points.

“Liberals are leaning hard into being DINKs (Dual Income No Kids), being childless or having fewer kids, and it being very much a choice, whereas for conservatives having kids is still very much a part of what it means to be a whole person,” Perry said.

Having kids doesn’t preclude workforce participation, and plenty of liberals are still putting a priority on parenthood. But as birth and marriage rates fall, some conservatives are doubling down on the importance of starting a family.

“If you decide to not work or not lean in in the first 10 years of being a mom and you do that in your 20s, there’s still plenty of time to start working in your 30s and have a meaningful career,” said Carrie Lukas , the president of Independent Women, a right-leaning public policy organisation focused on women’s economic issues.

At a conference for conservative college women in Scottsdale, Ariz., last month, speaker after speaker (including Brown) encouraged the 100 gathered women ages 18 to 22 to pursue careers and education—but not at the expense of marriage and children.

Reagan Conrad, who hosts “The Comments Section” podcast for the Daily Wire, discouraged egg freezing. “If we as women are putting our eggs on ice for a decade to make sure that our career is thriving,” she said, “we have a prioritisation problem.”

K.T. McFarland talked about leaving her job in public affairs at the Pentagon at 34 to raise five kids and deciding to return to the workforce after 9/11, when she was 50. The former Fox News analyst served as President Trump’s deputy national security adviser in his first term.

Kimberly Begg , president of the nonprofit Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women, which was hosting the event, told the audience that Gen Z is the “loneliest generation” because members of that demographic group are a part of smaller and more fractured families.

Begg also said that they have been told lies such as “faith and family hold you back.”

The 49-year-old says she regrets putting her travel-heavy job as general counsel of a nonprofit over the needs of her five young kids earlier in her career.

“One of my daughters learned how to use the phone and she called me constantly because she wanted me to come home,” Begg said in an interview after the conference. “My children were not thriving.”

She decided to quit that role after seeing how the big-eyed Beanie Babies she brought home as souvenirs for her daughter after each work trip had taken over her room.

After five years at home, during which time she wrote two nonfiction books and advised nonprofits, Begg joined the Luce Center in 2024.

A few months after she became president, she shifted the in-person office hours—which they call “collaboration hours”—to end at 2 p.m. to accommodate mothers picking their kids up from school and other family priorities.

“Children and marriages and families need more than just loving thoughts,” said Begg. “They need presence. And these hours allow me to be present with my children while I’m engaging in meaningful work.”

She encourages the students she mentors to look for the flexible work arrangements that have become more common postpandemic. (Though they can come with drawbacks for career advancement and pay.)

“You can have everything you want,” Begg says. “But you can’t have it all at once.”

Grace De Mars , a 21-year-old senior at California Baptist University who attended the conference, recently got engaged to her high school boyfriend.

She has been trying to reconcile her aspirations to become a history teacher with her desire to start a family in her mid-20s. Her mother, who had her at 39, warned her about how much harder that late pregnancy was than her previous three.

“I have to come to terms with what’s more important for our children and for our family,” said De Mars. “Especially as a teacher, it’s not like I can just clock out and go home and not take my work with me.”

As a young mother and policy analyst working remotely for conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, 28-year-old Emma Waters is both living and researching the seasons approach.

She left a fast-paced, coalition-building role when she and her husband decided to have children so that she could be home with them—now ages 2½ and 11 months—during the day. Since then, she says she’s turned down other in-person career opportunities she would have otherwise enjoyed.

“I love my work, but my top priority is to raise my children, and that cannot be outsourced to someone else for eight hours a day, five days a week,” said Waters. “The ‘you can have it all’ mindset is so misleading and sets women up for disappointment.”

She knows that not every woman can work remotely, and that living on a single salary isn’t an option for many families. She also doesn’t prescribe her family’s approach as a singular ideal, acknowledging that seasons look different for everyone.

In her work as a policy analyst, she is advocating for “more financial support for married, working families in particular alongside the social support systems we have in place for single-parent families already.”

Mostly, however, she thinks it is the culture that needs to change to make it easier for people to fit their work around their families, rather than the other way around.

“The answer is more community support to find flexible work for young mothers,” Waters said.

In posts to her roughly 2 million mostly young Instagram and TikTok followers, Turning Point representative Brown asks: Why wait for marriage and parenthood? “It’s not true that walking down the aisle or welcoming a child into the world will somehow limit your personal freedom,” she said.

Brown records her show for the Daily Wire from her house in Washington, D.C., and often brings her daughter to the speaking engagements she travels to all over the country.

Her husband, Brock Belcher , who works in communications for the Trump administration, shares child-care responsibilities for their daughter Isla “with the exception of breast-feeding,” Brown joked.

Their experience as a young family, Brown said, differs from the message she thinks a lot of young people see about how they should structure their lives.

“We are looking around at the antifamily state of affairs in our country,” Brown said, “and realising that, for the most part, people aren’t happy or fulfilled.”

Steven Clark had the unpleasant task of firing a 24-year-old—twice. Once was in a brief conversation with the new hire, who’d showed up late or not at all four times in his first week at a construction job.

Then Clark had to do it all over again, this time with the guy’s mother.

She called him a few hours later, pleading to give her son another chance. When Clark told her no, things got heated before he ended the call.

“I said, ‘Look, you know, this is between us and your son. He’s the employee,’” says Clark, who is chief operating officer of a Fairbanks, Alaska-based staffing firm.

Gen Zers make up nearly one-fifth of the adult workforce, and bosses and recruiters say it often feels like the nervous parents who hovered over them through childhood and college are right alongside them. What began as the occasional parent ride-along to a job interview coming out of the Covid era is now full-on career “co-piloting,” said Jasmine Escalera, head career coach at résumé templates service Zety.

More parents are calling up hiring managers, applying for jobs on their adult child’s behalf, and even showing up—or lurking just off-screen—on Zoom calls to help navigate difficult conversations or go over benefits packages.

“The first time it happened, I was appalled,” says Clark, who has fielded calls from parents asking why their child didn’t get a job. “Since then it’s become more of a here-we-go-again reaction.”

Human resource professionals have expressed outrage on social media.

“Parents should not be calling employers to check on their application status or ask questions on behalf of their child,” says Lynne Alba, a director of talent acquisition and physician recruitment at a large health system on Long Island, who vented about the phenomenon in a Tik Tok video she reposted on LinkedIn.

At a recent job fair, a mother approached Alba with her daughter’s résumé, explaining that she wanted to work as a nurse. “While I appreciated that she was trying to help, I intentionally shifted my attention to her daughter. No matter what Mom said, I wanted to hear directly from the candidate,” says Alba.

Some parents who step in say it’s a challenging job market for young people, and that they would only intervene in extreme circumstances—social anxiety, a toxic boss, unfair treatment. There’s also a gray area of intervention that some see as an extension of the parental advice and networking help that’s been happening for generations.

Rick Wainschel last year published a post on LinkedIn asking his network to help his daughter, a recent college graduate, find a corporate entry-level position.

Wainschel, a vice president at an automotive marketing technology company, says he doesn’t think his outreach qualifies as helicoptering. “Well, maybe a little,” he said, before quickly adding he was being half tongue-in-cheek. “It was really merely just to help her get a network established. I just think the work world is a challenging place.”

Wainschel’s post, which was OK’d by his daughter on the condition he didn’t embarrass her, didn’t lead to a job but did result in productive conversations, he said. She found a job with a credit union on her own shortly after.

Recruiters and other HR types say aggressive parental involvement signals a lack of independence and raises fears that mom and dad will be checking in regularly if their kid gets hired.

What’s more, they say, such interference rarely, if ever, works.

The phenomenon is becoming so commonplace it made the agenda of human resources organization SHRM’s national conference in June. When James Harrell asked a room of 250 professionals if they ever had a parent calling on behalf of a young employee or coming to an interview, more than half raised their hands.

“The first time it happened to me, I got high up on my soapbox and I shook my fist,” Harrell says. “The 15th time I said, ‘OK, well, I gotta figure out how to do something differently.’”

Harrell helped run an apprenticeship program for high-school students while he was the human capital management chief for the San Antonio Independent School District. To run interference, the district introduced a “signing day” when parents could come and ask questions.

After a Gen Z employee at Nation’s Best Holdings, a chain of hardware and home goods stores, didn’t get an “exceeds expectations” designation on his performance review last year, HR chief Amber Little got a call asking why.

It was one of a number of calls from parents her office has picked up recently about issues ranging from negative feedback to understanding which health insurance plan to choose. Little has even noticed parents are now calling in sick for their adult kids.

“Instead of coaching them, they do it for them,” Little says. When it happens, she adds, “we encourage them to tell their child to come talk to us and we will walk them through it.”

A Zety survey of more than 1,000 Gen Zers found 20% had a parent attend a job interview with them.

“You get a sense it’s all hands on deck for some families,” says Keith Wolf, managing partner of recruiting firm Murray Resources in Houston. His office has received emails from parents seeking jobs for their children, and Wolf says he’s always wondered if the kids even knew.

Paul “PB” Branson, who graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia in May, bristles at the thought. The 22-year-old says while he understands their anxiety, parents shouldn’t be joining their children’s job interviews or contacting employees on their behalf.

“That trend,” he says, “has really hurt my generation by creating this kind of stereotype that we need our hands held.”

Conservative Young Women Flip the Script: Kids First, Then Career

‘Seasons’ is the new buzzword for those starting a family earlier in life and focusing on professional advancement later.