Gen Z household trend leaving others baffled

News.com.au

26-05-2025

OPINION
Has anyone seen an exit sign? Because I need to find a side door and quietly slip out of this whole era.
I've been stewing on data from appliance giant Westinghouse for three days straight. I just can't get over it. The study was conducted by YouGov online earlier this year, with a representative sample of 1000 Australians aged 18-29.
Westinghouse found that 69 per cent of Gen Z respondents use their oven or dishwasher for storage, and 39 per cent still bring their laundry home to mum and dad.
My first response, as an exhausted, menopausal, middle-aged parent, was to seethe about Gen Z, which happens to me sometimes. What are they storing in their ovens and dishwashers, I wondered. Their staggering sneaker collections? Unwise impulse buys from the Iconic? Laundry baskets overflowing with Labubus? Or are these whitegoods stuffed full of all Gen Z's unfiltered feelings?
As for bringing the laundry home to mum and dad at their age, well, they can shove that where the sheets won't dry.
These children are up to 29 years old – that's just embarrassing. Where's the pride and personal accountability? And who are their parents, enabling this developmentally stunted failure to launch?!
But as I fumed, the answer dawned on me. The parents responsible for this epic failure to equip Gen Z for so much as a load of laundry are in my own generation, Gen X.
Well, what a massive disappointment we turned out to be. This one is on us.
And that got me thinking about what our own youth was like.
There are enough memes and Facebook groups about growing up in the '70s and '80s to make clear Gen X fancies itself as the cool kids club. Not wearing bike helmets was the least of it. We roamed the streets and malls and our mostly Boomer parents were brazen in their preference for each other's company above ours. Their colossal, permanent project of self-interest meant a wholesale rejection of the single most tedious part of parenting – supervising children – and some of us were lucky to make it out alive, myself included.
I nearly drowned at one '70s backyard party. The adults were far too busy necking Coolabah cask wine and long necks of KB to notice the toddler silently sinking in the unfenced pool. I can still remember looking up in that sleepy underwater dreamworld to see the hostess Moosa's kaftan billowing like a gymbaroo parachute when she hit the water fully clothed, plunging to the bottom in an instant to scoop me up.
By the time I was 18, the same age as the youngest survey respondents, I had lived or had extended stays in 22 different homes. In my early 20s, my housemates included a compulsive liar, a sneaky thief, a serial AVO violator, a nascent werewolf, a two-faced bovine creature who was like an emotionally manipulative version of Dr Doolittle's Push-Me-Pull-You, and a gaslighting two-timer.
Good times.
But from the age of 14, I have always, always held down a job, and in my 20s I put myself through uni, paid my own rent, paid my bills, did my laundry, washed my dishes, shopped for groceries and taught myself to cook.
The survey brought to mind a hit Australian novel published in those years called He Died with a Felafel in His Hand. Drawing liberally on the author's own experiences of shadehouses, the book was so funny because it was so true. Personally I wouldn't be without any of my freak show experiences. There was never, ever a dull moment, whereas I worry constantly – and I mean I wake up worrying about this most nights – that our young people's lives are drowning in dull moments.
There is something so dull-dull-dulling about all that time they spend on their screens. I worry myself sick that its sinister, omnipresent glow is dimming the bright, beautiful light of the best years of their lives.
They're being robbed blind – and all of us in Gen X know it, too, because we had a lawless adolescence and crazy stupid fun early adulthood in the years before the internet and mobile phones. We did not look down. It was always best not to.
So we learned some things the hard way – but we also learned to take care of business.
So why do 70 per cent of so-called 'independent' 18-29 year olds (among whom 26 per cent have never paid all their own household bills; 24 per cent have never cleaned an oven; 24 per cent have never paid all their own car expenses and 30 per cent have never mowed a lawn) say in the Westinghouse survey that they wish they had learned more about managing a home before flying the coop?
Why the hell didn't we teach them?
Gen X wears the scars and tells the stories of our parents' casual abandonment with unbridled pride and joy now – because it was kind of great for us – so why have we done things so very differently with our own kids? All they do is look down. All the time.
Let's call it the 'effluencer epoch', because the steaming garbage tip of so-called influencers and their TikTok automaton audience is threatening to define a couple of generations of kids if we adults don't snap out of our collective social media content coma and do something. I'm going to call those self-serving social sickness drug dealers 'effluencers' from now on because I have never seen so much crap in circulation and frankly it's clogging all the pipes – our children's social, emotional, mental and physical pipes, I mean.
Not only was it not so bad growing into adulthood the way we did, at a time when these devices and platforms did not exist and a dishwasher was the most coveted, cutting-edge item in the house, the crippling consequences of a scenario that is much, much worse is all around us, affecting our Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids. WALL-E was written by Gen X-er Andrew Stanton. It was a cautionary tale, not a blueprint for our children's future.