Donald Sensing has a post up with excerpts of some good information about modern love and marriage in response to a great post by Dean Esmay on teen pregnancy. From Mr. Esmay:
Now, an interesting thing to contemplate is that we as a society may be making a mistake to encourage people to wait so long to get married and have kids. At times I think it's a huge mistake. I could write a whole essay defending that, but here's a basic point to ponder: one of the biggest frustrations for women these days is that they delay and delay and delay having kids, put tons of time into career, then find themselves in their 30s with their biological alarm clocks going off, frantically thinking about having kids. Then when they have kids, they get hugely frustrated because balancing career and childrearing is exhausting.Not everything Mr. Esmay says is entirely accurate, by my understanding. While women did marry quite young by modern standards, men generally had to wait until they could afford to keep a wife (and the kids that would inevitably come soon after marriage). It's only recently that men and women near the same ages marry each other, and one can only speculate on the effect it's having on our civilization. Nothing is more fundamental to a species than its reproductive cycle, and I'm certain that these changes have wide-ranging effects, both subtle and obvious.But what if you had 2-3 kids by the time you were 21, and then stopped having them? By the time you were in your mid-30s, you would have the next 30-40 years of your life to develop career, go to school, and persue outside interests. You'd also be able to begin playing with your own grandchildren while you were still young and vital, if your daughters started having kids at the same age you did. If this were widespread, it would be normal for parents to help their children start raising their own babies. Extended families would probably be more common, and the whole kids-vs.-career struggle would be hugely ameliorated. A woman in her early 30s would be in the prime of life, with endless possibilities still ahead of her to do whatever she wanted, with no worries at all about her "biological clock ticking," for she'd have taken care of that business long ago! ...
Listen up: I grew up knowing a lot of girls who got pregnant in their teens. Not a single one of them did not know how pregnancy occurred. Not a single one of them was unaware that she could get pregnant. Not a single one of them lacked access to birth control. Every single one of them got pregnant by choice. Sure, some of them would lie and say they "didn't know you could get pregnant just doing it once," or that it was an "accident," but the truth they just said that to make the adults happy. Every single one of them really knew better. They did it anyway.
It's odd to me that females are continuing to hit menarche at ever earlier ages, even as the age that women give birth to their first child continues to rise. This suggests that there is some reproductive benefit to starting menstruation younger, other than the obvious benefit that would be gained if women were also having children at younger ages.
I expect that much of the listlessness of today's youth arises from the fact that they're biologically capable of starting a family, but socially prohibited. I'm not saying this is a bad thing -- the immediate benefits certainly outweigh the costs, or it wouldn't be happening -- but what are the long-term costs? Our society couldn't function without a core cadre of highly-trained college graduates, and as technology advances it's possible that the size of that required core may increase relative to the population. If that's the case, then it may be necessary for the average child-bearing age to rise.
However, in my opinion much of our population is ever-educated. Many people go to college, learn almost nothing, waste 4 (or 5, or 6) years, and then get a job they could have done right out of high school. Not only is this a drain on our economy and a waste of resources for all parties, but college generally delays the decision to get married and have kids.
Reproduction touches every aspect of human society, and I have no doubt there are nearly an infinite number of factors that contribute to and result from these cultural trends. It's possible that our "cultural depravity" is one result and our technological progress is another. Maybe you can't have one without the other. Personally, I don't believe there was a "cultural golden age" in which morally sound values ruled the day, so I'm not sure we've sacrificed anything substantial in that regard. Maybe I'm wrong about that, though.
Update:
Here's some info I dug up about marriage ages throughout history.
Ancient Greeks married at age 30 for men, 15 for women (when females hit puberty back then).
Europeans in the Middle Ages did similarly.
19th and 20th Century Americans married later, with both men and women in their 20s.
Elizabethan Brits married pretty old, apparently.
That's a pretty good point. However, with today's flaky marriages, and lack of resources (without sacrificing everything) for single parent's, embarking on a 20 year+ project of raising kids seems a bit of a gamble.
Robert Heinlien has a cool idea--line marriages (from his book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress). These marriages have multiple spouses, kept in gender balance, and when one spouse dies off, another young one is married (with the approval of all the spouses). This provides stability and perspective for all the spouses.
In many ways, "Line marriages" are a corporation to ensure stability, resouces, and all that good stuff.
The premise of the book is that moon colonists have a rough life, and develop their own inovative ways to deal with colonizing the moon.
Terry: I'm familiar with the book, I was named after the computer :)
Nevertheless, communal marriages like that have never worked, all throughout history. Basically, multiple wives seems workable, but multiple husbands doesn't.
As much as i've always enjoyed Heinlien's politics, i've always had problems with his ideas on marriage and sex. They seem like the type of ideas that a bunch of guys decided would be ideal for guys. The only reason they work in his books is that all his great female characters act exactly like the guys.
I'm a great example of the over educated. I spent too long in college, have an obscene level of student loan debt and haven't earned one penny since graduation doing what i studied (physics). I bought into the line.
I delayed having kids for many years, because I was "too smart" to panic and have 'em in a hurry. I was a product of my culture, and the in-vitro didn't work, so we're adopting.
It's basically a tradeoff: when you're young you're too immature to raise kids properly. You're too ruled by emotions, too likely to fly off the handle, unable to impart to others wisdom you still lack.
But when you're facing motherhood in your forties (like some of us), the concern is sheer physical exhaustion--can I handle the sleepless nights? We'll see.
LMA: Unfortunately, many of the girls I know seem to feel like you did.
Mark:
I know what you mean--all of his women and his main characters all tend to have the same outlook on life. Which is fine (I mostly like the outlooks), but his books seem to miss the complexities of real life. (I guess this is true of many books, though.)
Micheal:
Nevertheless, communal marriages like that have never worked, all throughout history. Basically, multiple wives seems workable, but multiple husbands doesn't.
If "communal" means gender balanced marriages with more than 2 spouses, I think this is mostly because of the role of religion in history. Religions of the Book (Judaism, Islam, Christianity) all emphasized the authority of males, and prevented that arrangement from occurring (along with a lack of respect for women's independence).
Now that it is possible for women to make their own money and be successful and stay single AND the role of religion in organizing society is diminishing, who knows? I imagine there are lots of different issues to work through. In this case, you just wouldn't have the advantage of finding others who had done the same thing.
I'm actually living with a woman(my girlfriend) and her husband (my friend) who have an open marriage. We all get along great, and have for around three years. I don't think there is anything about men that precludes multiple men in a successful communal marriage--not that we are married, or are ready to mix finances that way, but I don't see any insurmountable issues from my perspective.
Terry: I've never heard of such an arrangement working before. Interesting.
I don't think the problem stems from religion, other than the fact that all the religions you mentioned encode the basic biological reality of our species (and mammals in general). Biologically, mating is for reproduction. One male can impregnate hundreds of females, which is why harems are an obvious benficial survival adaptation. A female could benefit from the support of a male-harem, but there's nothing in it for the males since only one of them will be able to have offspring (which isn't the case with female-harems).
There are a hunge number of psychological and sociological factors that come into play, and they all work against the type of arrangement you're in. It's easy to see why: you're biologically "dead" as long as you're with a female who won't carry your children.
First, let's talk about this:
---Our society couldn't function without a core cadre of highly-trained college graduates, and as technology advances it's possible that the size of that required core may increase relative to the population...However, in my opinion much of our population is ever-educated. Many people go to college, learn almost nothing, waste 4 (or 5, or 6) years, and then get a job they could have done right out of high school. Not only is this a drain on our economy and a waste of resources for all parties, but college generally delays the decision to get married and have kids.
Okay, so what even makes you think that the core needs to be college educated? Today, some children who are high school students are taught modern biology and biochemistry, full years of what was once college physics and college calculus, organic chemistry, economics, differential equations, and as much history/english/philosophy as they are ever taught in college. In fact, for the children who find school to be easy/dull/boring, they spend their entire 1st-8th grades learning Nothing that they didn't already know. Clearly, more could be taught to them.
But, what even makes you think that as technology advances, the size of the core needs to increase? At every turn, technology increases productivity. It turns tasks that required thought into tasks that can be done by underlings, machines, or other simply-trained staff. You may think philosophically about the problem of the means of innovation being in such a small portion of society, but the fact is that it always has been small. The sea change needed to make it large is on a different path than the one this society is on, anyway. This society doesn't have more need for highly trained college graduates.
Your comments about over-education are true not just about college, but about government schooling in general. Our society is trying to push back the age of adulthood. Increasingly, children are encouraged to go to college to do two things: 1. have "an experience" in which their extended adolescence protects them from responsibility, and 2. get a credential that helps them get a job later (never mind that they are at odds with each other)--and even such small things as our laws about gun ownership, drinking demonstrate that our society doesn't want to consider an 18 yr old an adult. (And where did this notion of college as "an experience" come from? why from the baby boomers of course! from their own addled memories of that Great Time(tm), the 60s!!! when they got to "grow socially, politically" blah blah blah blah blah. And make no mistake, those boomers are now college administrators.)
The fact is that people in America used to get married young so that they could have sex. Now, they don't have to get married in order to have sex. So they get to have their cake and eat it too.
Would it be better if women got married young, had children young, and had college and careers later? Well, yes and no. I think that they would do well later, yes. But who would they marry, when they are young? Good providers? Where would they find them? You would have to go back to a society that thinks men and women are different and mature differently. You would have to tell young men to become responsible rather rapidly; would they get to go to college? if so, you would have to teach them to value a woman who is not their intellectual/educational equal, and wouldn't be for another decade or two. you would have to teach them to believe that the responsibility of family at a young age was preferable to extended adolescence. But men aren't risk takers when they marry young. They can't be. Risk taking is necessary for innovation. So you might be changing society in ways that aren't so obvious right now. Of course, a society where women disempower men and rely on the State instead is a society without risk taking, too.
my question to this article is what is young? my parent's got married in teir early 20's and both had been to university and gotten jobs, they had my older brother when mum was 24, me when she was 26 and now my brother 17 years later. My parents found it easier to have us kids when they were in their twenties than having my little brother now even with my older brother and I to babysit almost any time. It's a lot more physically demanding because kids get more active as they get older so when my little brother gets handed off to me it's usually because he wants to do something. I think having kids young is a good idea and grandparents will usually help out if they had kids young to because they know how hard it is to raise kids. I know I'm just a kid but I know I can take care of my little bro a lot more cheerfully than my parents even if he doesn't sleep through the night for me either
A: The "core" I'm referring to is the group required to build the technological products that increase the efficiency of everyone else. I said the relative size of the core may be increasing -- particularly as low-skilled labor is moved offshore, and the definition of "low-skilled" gets higher.
I like the idea of government schooling building a shared sense of civilization into our population, but mostly that shared sense is nonsense right now because it isn't grounded in practicialities, as you indicate.
a teen: I hoped to have kids in my 20s for many of the reasons you described, but it's not looking so good at the moment!
At first, I was depressed when, at the age of 22, I found out I was pregnant. Yes, I knew how I got pregnant. Yes, it was preventable. However, I still had a lot I wanted to do (career) and experience (benefits of making good monay/having good career). I am also a huge pro-life believer and knew I would never have an abortion and for personal reasons, did not want to give my child up for adoption. Now, six years later, I am SO happy I had my daughter when I did (and her sister 14 months later). I see friends and acquaintances who have waited until their early or mid-30s or later to have children and have a variety of "problems". They have trouble getting pregnant in the first place and then, if they want more than one child they have to have two or three in just a couple years time before biology starts to work against them.
My mom had me when she was 22 and due to her young looking face, we were often mistaken for sisters or friends. I enjoy my daughters so much right now and it pleases me to think that I'll still be "young" when they are young adults. The kicker is I now feel like I have the best of both worlds. I have a very fulfilling job that I love and never would have known about had I not had my children when I did.
I think it's a myth that people used to get married really young. I've done some pretty extensive genealogical research on my ancestors from the Azores islands of Portugal, back to the 1600's, and the average age at first marriage among them is nearly 29 for men and 24 1/2 for women. The youngest couple married in my family tree were 15 and 13, and they are definitely the exception. As for younger women marrying older men, Queen St. Isabel takes the prize at age 11. But she's royalty; the people whose ages are represented by these stats were commoners.
You'd think that on a bunch of islands in the middle of nowhere, in a society where women's only viable occupation was getting married and having ten children, people would get married younger than that. But the stats don't lie.
WH: The details vary from place to place, and I can't speak to the specifics of your family, but the specifics of marriages are some of the most detailed historical records we have. Most societies save written marriage records for inheritance purposes, if nothing else. All the evidence I've seen goes against your experience and in favor of the Conventional Wisdom.
After writing that paragraph, I found the following pages:
Ancient Greeks married at age 30 for me, 15 for women (when females hit puberty back then).
Europeans in the Middle Ages did similarly.
19th and 20th Century Americans married later, with both men and women in their 20s.
Elizabethan Brits married pretty old though, apparently.