Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everyone. Thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch. And in today's episode, we're looking at why Gen z is going to work for mom and dad again. This is coming from a really interesting article I read this week about how overwhelmingly more Gen zers are working for their parents than any previous generation at least recently in America.

There are a number of reasons for this. They're probably worth discussing. The job market hasn't been great for the last few years. And what Gen Z ers are realizing is that just because you want a job or just because you went to college to prepare for a job doesn't mean the market is gonna hand you a job. So it's a lot easier to go to mom and dad and see if the company they own or work for is is offering a job and get that than it is to get one in the larger world.

There are also people are living longer. So mom and dad are increasingly a little more prepared for retirement and a little ready to retire. A 42% of small businesses owned by families have owners that are looking to hand off the business soon, and they're starting to think, maybe I should get my kids in on the ground floor so that they learn the business as I'm ready to pass it down. It used to be that going to work for mom and dad was a little bit of a stigma. You couldn't hack it on your own.

You couldn't carve out your own space. But now it's being seen a little more as a legacy. What your parents have built, they're now giving to you to, hopefully, for you to build and pass down to future generations to come. That's seen as beautiful, not a sign that you can't make it on your own. It's also causing real families, to navigate the difficult nature of nepotism and, timing and the process of handing off of your family dynamic versus, when Thanksgiving dinner is not just a time for your family to gather, but an employee's meeting of sorts.

So what does that mean? Why is Gen z going to work for mom and dad, and what are the theological implications of that? Well, you listen to this podcast, you may not own a business. You may not be looking to hire your children. But I will say this, one of the things I appreciate about this trend and I think is in keeping with the Bible is the idea of thinking multi generationally.

For the last hundred years, American culture has highlighted the individual. You you are an island unto yourself. You think about yourself, not about anyone else. It's kinda the the main ethos of our culture. But the Bible couldn't be further from that.

Psalm one forty five four, for example, we're told that one generation commends God's works to the next. That involves time. That involves intentionality. We're telling the stories of God's faithfulness, not just in the Bible, but in our own families, including even in our family businesses. The Bible tells us in first Timothy five eight that hard work is connected to providing for your family.

That far from an exclusive kind of individualism, work is meant to be understood as a blessing, not just to you, but to your family at large. It we're told in Philippians two to have the mind of Jesus, which considers other people more valuable than ourselves and lays our life down, which might mean mom and dad laying down, this the profits they might have made had they sold the business to someone else or laying down their retirement timetable. It might mean son or daughter laying down other dreams to continue to build the family business. The truth is that legacy is about more than money. Proverbs thirteen twenty two says that, that a righteous man leaves an inheritance to his children's children's.

He's thinking multigenerationally. And I wanna encourage you to go down this road, to think as men and women who wanna leave a legacy that echoes not just to our children, but to our children's children's children. That might be in starting a business. That might be in offering a job to your kids. It might be in the way you save money or the way you spend money.

It might be reflected in the time you give or the priorities you have, but this is a good trend. We are not an island unto ourselves. And as men and women who might have spouses or children or grandchildren, brothers and sisters, cousins, friends, We are responsible to each other. We are responsible to invest in the in the flourishing of the lives around us that God has entrusted to us. So whatever this looks like for you, my encouragement is step out of American individualism, step into multi generational gospel oriented living and as a result, not only will you flourish, but your family will for generations.

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Have an article you’d like Zach to discuss? Email us at wakeup@ccchapel.com!