Every generation gets told the same thing about Social Security — pay in, and it'll be there when your turn comes. For older generations, that promise largely held. For children born today, the honest answer is more complicated, and pretending otherwise doesn't prepare them for what they're actually likely to inherit.

Social Security's own trustees have published projections showing the trust fund reserves are on a path toward depletion within a timeframe that falls inside the working lifetime of people who are children right now. That doesn't necessarily mean zero benefit ever arrives. It likely means a reduced benefit, unless changes get made well before then, an outcome that's genuinely uncertain rather than either fully guaranteed or completely gone.

Gregory Mannarino has been direct about this for years, encouraging people to prepare younger generations for a version of retirement that doesn't lean entirely on a program with real, documented funding questions decades before they'd ever collect from it. This isn't fear for its own sake. It's reading an actual public report and taking it seriously.

The honest answer to whether your children will see Social Security is probably some version of it, just not necessarily the full version their grandparents received. Preparing them with that honest expectation, rather than the old assumption, is the more useful gift than pretending nothing's changed.