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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If you want people to have babies in their twenties, make college and daycare free and get the housing market sorted out so that most young people can spend less than 50% of their income just on shelter within commuting distance. Until then, having a baby while young is something for the very poor and very wealthy outside of very conservative religious backgrounds. [/quote]

+1, right now only three groups of people have kids early:

1) Poor people who don't know better or don't feel like they have anything better to look forward to so they have kids as teens or in their early 20s, and then those kids are also poor because they have poor parents who lack education and therefore can't get out of poverty. We should be actively discouraging this to give these folks a chance to at least finish high school and enter job training programs so that when they have kids, they can create stable homes and offer those kids something other than a repeat of their own childhoods.

2) People with a lot of family support and financial resources. I wouldn't say all of these people are wealthy, and not all wealthy people offer this to their kids. But basically having a kid in your early or mid 20s is a lot more feasible if you feel like you have a community around you who can help, and you feel that community is supportive of you marrying and having kids. But a lot of MC and UMC families actually discourage early marriage or kids, and can withhold support if it happens because they think it's a mistake. It's also common for people in the MC and above to move far from parents and childhood communities for college or work, which makes it harder to create this kind of community support. Once someone has moved hundreds of miles from their support system, it immediately becomes more sensible to wait to have kids until you can afford to create your own support system where you are. And yes, that takes a lot of money. Childcare is expensive, housing is expensive, the services that can take the place of community support (therapists, doulas, paid sitters, cleaners to help during pregnancy or just after childbirth) all cost money. Can you have kids without all that? Sure. But it's more stressful and less pleasant, can be hard on marriages, and can be hard on mental health. Parents of all ages do better with support networks. Sensible people will delay parenthood until they have that support network, which often means waiting until they can buy it.

3) Really religious people, who are a combination of #1 and #2 -- they often don't value education, especially for women, and do value having kids, so they make the same choice a lot of poor people do in opting for early parenthood ever setting themselves up for careers. But also they tend to have strong support networks through their religious groups, so that obstacle to parenthood doesn't exist for them. Even if they move to new cities, if they are active in their church, temple, or mosque, and the community is very conservative and pro-procreation, they will have a lot of community support when they have kids.

This is just how it is. If you don't like it, you have to change the circumstances. You can't just yell at people to have kids earlier, it doesn't make sense within the parameters of our culture most of the time.[/quote]

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