A first-person essay published on businessinsider.com has struck a nerve with readers across generations. In it, a woman who has spent almost forty years raising two millennial children now in their thirties describes how the rise of artificial intelligence has reframed her long-held wish for grandchildren. Where she once imagined holding a new baby, she now finds herself quietly relieved that her adult kids seem uninterested in having children of their own.
The piece is less a complaint than a confession, and it captures a mood that has been spreading quietly through parenting forums, office Slack channels and family group chats for several years. It also offers a useful mirror for project leaders, agile coaches and team managers, many of whom are having the same kind of late-night conversations at home that they are expected to lead past at work.
At a glance
- The author identifies as a Generation Jones parent with two grown children born in the millennial bracket, now in their thirties.
- She has spent nearly four decades worrying about her kids' safety and now adds AI to that list.
- A dinner-table conversation about the technological singularity roughly fifteen years ago first triggered her concern.
- Her children are in stable relationships and careers, yet show little movement toward parenthood.
- She frames choosing to raise a child today as an act of courage she admires but no longer envies.
How we got here
Generational labels aside, the experience she describes is familiar to many professionals who came of age believing the future would keep getting better. The turn of the millennium brought rapid internet adoption, smartphones, social media, climate extremes, a global pandemic, and now a wave of generative AI tools that can draft code, write copy and analyse data in seconds. Each wave shortened the perceived distance between a sci-fi headline and a kitchen-table worry.
For parents whose working lives already demand constant adaptation, the latest shift feels personal. The same AI tools that may reshape agile project management workflows, leadership pipelines and scrum ceremonies are also the systems that will inherit — or upend — the world today's children will grow up in. That overlap is new, and it is why the essay resonates beyond parenting columns.
What it means for you
If you lead teams, coach agile squads or mentor younger colleagues, this story is not really about grandchildren. It is about the emotional load your people are carrying into standups and retrospectives. Many of them are simultaneously planning families, paying mortgages and wondering whether the career ladders they are climbing will look the same in a decade.
That has practical consequences. A team member weighing childcare costs against the pace of automation may be quieter in sprint planning than usual. A high performer in their thirties may be quietly recalculating whether a promotion, a sabbatical or a baby is the right next move. None of that shows up on a Kanban board, but all of it shapes delivery.
Our analysis
The essay is striking because the author is not anti-AI and not anti-parenthood. She calls having children today brave, and she credits her own kids with being engaged adults. The shift is in her emotional ledger: the imagined joys of grandparenting no longer outweigh, in her mind, the weight of an uncertain future.
For leaders, that is the part worth sitting with. The trade-off is not between technology and family, it is between optimism and preparation. The parents who feel this way are often the same ones preparing their children for volatile markets, climate risk and AI-augmented work. They are not opting out; they are hedging.
The people who lose in this dynamic are those who treat family planning as a private matter disconnected from workplace design. The people who win are organisations that acknowledge the overlap, offer genuine flexibility, and treat long-horizon thinking — a hallmark of strong agile leadership — as a shared project rather than an individual burden.
Say you are a scrum master
You notice that one of your senior developers, a parent of a toddler, has started declining optional ceremonies and seems distracted during backlog grooming. Instead of filing it as a performance issue, you raise it in your next one-on-one. You discover that she is also helping her own mother, recently diagnosed with a chronic illness, navigate a flood of AI-generated medical summaries online. A simple accommodation — recording grooming sessions and pinning a written summary — addresses both work and family stress without anyone having to disclose more than they wish. That is agile leadership meeting reality where it actually lives.
What to watch next
Expect more essays like this one, and more honest conversations inside teams. Watch for employers that start treating AI literacy, retirement planning and parental leave as a single integrated benefits conversation rather than three separate ones. The parents who feel bravest about having children today will probably be the same parents pushing hardest for clarity from the systems around them.
Bottom line: the dream of grandchildren has not disappeared for this generation of parents; it has been weighed against a new kind of risk, and for now, the risk is winning. Leaders who name that openly will get more trust than those who pretend the world feels as smooth as it once did.
Key takeaways
- AI anxiety is now a family-planning variable, not just a workplace one.
- Agile leaders should expect personal uncertainty to surface inside team rituals.
- Practical accommodations — recorded meetings, written summaries, flexible hours — address both parenting and eldercare stress.
- Treat AI literacy, long-horizon planning and family support as one conversation, not three.
Frequently asked questions
What did the businessinsider.com essay actually say?
It is a first-person piece in which a woman on the older side of Gen X, raising two millennials, explains that she once wanted grandchildren but now feels relieved her adult kids show little interest in having children, because of her growing worry about an AI-shaped future.
Why does a parenting essay matter to project managers and agile coaches?
Because the same people making sprint decisions are also making family decisions, and stress from one area reliably spills into the other. Recognising that overlap is part of modern leadership.
How is AI changing attitudes toward having children?
The author is not the first to raise the question, but her essay gives it a personal framing: rapid automation, resource use and existential risk make the long-term outlook feel less stable, which in turn makes parenthood feel like a heavier bet.
Is this a sign of a broader demographic trend?
The piece is one voice, not data, but it lines up with widely reported declines in birth rates across many developed economies and with surveys showing younger adults cite economic and environmental uncertainty as reasons to delay or skip having children.
What can leaders do this week based on this story?
Ask their teams, in a low-pressure way, how workload and life stage are interacting, and look for small process changes — meeting formats, documentation habits, flexibility windows — that reduce friction without requiring anyone to overshare.