Gen Zers discuss the prospect of taking on the responsibilities of a family with considerable apprehension. They see it in terms of the negative impact it would have on their personal freedom and finances as well as the environmental consequences. The sense of purpose and continuity that having children brings barely figures. Addressing declining enthusiasm for parenthood requires more than simply improving the practical and financial conditions in which people raise children. As Bristow and Lee argue, it also requires forging a cultural environment in which the prospect of building a family is something to look forward to again, rather than yet another source of anxiety.

Gen Zers’ problems are becoming all too apparent. Born between 1997 and 2012, the Gen Z cohort as a whole is now approaching adulthood. In the technical sense, at least. Bristow and Lee identify work, sex and politics as three fundamental dimensions through which young people develop their adult identity. Unfortunately, each dimension has been compromised by the contemporary preoccupation with individual identity.

In the workplace, the expectation that employment should provide a sense of personal fulfilment above all else risks obscuring its more fundamental role: providing financial independence from one’s parents, a degree of structure and a place within wider society. There is something to be said for Bristow and Lee’s defence of the rather unfashionable idea that work need not be a source of constant self-actualisation to be worthwhile. For a generation raised on the promise that we should all ‘do what we love’, the reality of having to earn a living at the expense of that can, for some, come as something of a disappointment.

The discussion of sex and relationships is perhaps more contentious. Bristow and Lee question whether contemporary understandings of gender and sexuality have become so centred on individual self-definition that they risk neglecting the relational dimensions of adult life. Their distinction between identity as self-presentation and sexuality as an orientation towards another person is an interesting one, particularly in a culture where dating increasingly takes place through apps, personal preferences are meticulously curated and potential partners can begin to resemble items on a shopping list. To what extent, I wonder, has the emphasis on knowing and asserting exactly who we are made us less comfortable with the compromises, uncertainties and mutual responsibilities that intimacy will at some point involve? This is not to suggest that greater sexual freedom or the ability to define one’s own identity are definitively incompatible with meaningful relationships. But it raises a question about whether we have become better at articulating our individual needs than at navigating the needs of other people.

That said, the material realities of contemporary life are clearly impacting Gen Zers’ attitude to adulthood. For a generation navigating an increasingly precarious housing market, financial insecurity and an uncertain employment landscape, the traditional milestones of adulthood – financial independence, homeownership, stable relationships and becoming parents – can feel increasingly remote. Perhaps, then, the question is not simply whether young people are struggling to embrace the responsibilities of adulthood, but whether the conditions that once made those responsibilities attainable have fundamentally changed. Cultural uncertainty and material insecurity may in fact reinforce one another. This raises a question that sits somewhat beyond the central argument of Growing Up in the Culture Wars: are young people reluctant to grow up, or are they coming of age in a world that offers them fewer opportunities to do so?

Bristow and Lee are careful to distance themselves from the idea that a retreat into conservatism would provide a neat answer to Gen Z’s problems. ‘Not least’, they suggest, because conservatives ‘seem rather confused about what, exactly, they are trying to conserve’. This is a welcome refusal to allow the culture war to continue dictating the terms of the debate. While the left can be guilty of looking at society’s traditions and bonds as things to be dismantled wholesale, the right is equally susceptible to the idealisation of a more coherent era – one that perhaps never truly existed, at least not at one singular point in time. Neither the right nor the left offers a particularly convincing response to the complexities of contemporary life for young people. What Bristow and Lee advocate instead is something more demanding: a restoration of intergenerational solidarity, intellectual openness and the capacity to disagree without grouping ourselves into opposing camps.

Growing Up in the Culture Wars does a remarkable job of providing a coherent account of what can, at times, feel like a series of unrelated generational issues and anxieties. Certainly, when people of my parents’ generation ask me to distill what the ‘problem’ with Gen Z is into a sentence or two, I’ve often found myself unable to single out one in particular. Bristow and Lee allow us to conceive of the troubles of my generation as a crisis, above all, of agency.

I know far too many young people who remain convinced, even into their mid-twenties, that they are not yet fully realised actors in the world. They feel things happen to them, rather than believing themselves to be people capable of making things happen. This sense of powerlessness can become self-fulfilling: those who believe the odds are irreversibly stacked against them may become less inclined to exercise the agency necessary to change their circumstances.

This is not to suggest that young people’s anxieties are misplaced in every circumstance – the economic and political realities of coming of age today are considerable, and cultural optimism alone won’t make getting on the property ladder less of an uphill struggle, or employment more secure. But there is a difference between recognising the hard realities of the world we have inherited, and becoming so consumed by them that we adopt a kind of learned helplessness.

Growing Up in the Culture Wars is a reminder that growing up has always involved learning to negotiate the world as it is, while developing the confidence to imagine what it might become. That requires disagreement, certainly, but also real-life relationships, and the belief that Gen Zers need not be prisoners of the current cultural moment. We still, for all our reservations and fears, have a future to make.

Growing Up in the Culture Wars: Identity and Generational Conflict, by Jennie Bristow and Ellie Lee, is published by Polity.