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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]For the professional middle class, having a kid in your 20s is as hard an obstacle as it is for a teen mom to get out of poverty.

You're right that you don't need to go to a selective private school, an Ivy, and graduate school or wait until your 30s to have kids in order to have a great life. 
By the time DC grows up, I hope it becomes easier to balance work and family and I wish that career paths are less lockstep. There's are certainly lots of academics, doctors, lawyers, management consultants, and finance people who would love to do something else. Congratulations to everyone who has found an alternative path.

But if you have a kid in your 20s, the odds are against you. It is very, very hard to start a family early in the usual upper middle class professions and you're likely to be pretty far off the typical career path.  Tenure is really hard if you can't move because of a spouse and kids and spend the time needed to research and carry a teaching load. Residency schedules are designed to discourage life outside the hospital.  Junior attorneys who can't work around the clock don't cut it at law firms. Consultants are lucky if they only need to travel 4 days/week. And in DC, all the K Streeters have to pay their dues/not get paid on the Hill first.

I would agree with anyone who says it shouldn't be this way, but that doesn't change the landscape.
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The same as a teenager mom? Are you kidding me. You are supposed to have kids in your 20's. You wait until you are in your 30/40's and your chances of infertility, Down's syndrome, miscarriages, stillborns, c-sections and other risks double to quadruple.  It is not the norm in any part of the world but a few selected areas in the US.  I don't think waiting makes any difference. Too much risk and too much financial issues when you should be retiring. I much rather have a family first and work straight thru to retirement with my kids all having complete college. I hope I am a grandparent before I retire too. I guess I am low-class :)

Also go to any fertility clinic and ask all those want-to-be moms who can't conceive and have such a small window, if they are glad they waited.  I know families that spent upwards of 50K to have a kid with no luck.  That is a gamble I wasn't going to back burner for a career. Family is much more important to me. I guess we value different things. [/quote]Some women prefer to wait for the right man.  But to hell with that.  Let any man that comes along  give you babies in your 20s just so you can say you had kids in your 20s and be a young grandparent.  Good enough for you, PP?[/quote]

So not only did anyone that have a baby under the age of 30 resemble a teenage mom. They also rushed and didn't find the right man?  Okay then...,[/quote]

I think what pp is saying is that if we didn't meet the right person in our 20s we're not going to just have kids with whomever is handy. If you met mr. Right in your early 20s good for you. But for some of us it didn't work out that way. I would've loved to have kids a few years earlier but if I had had them with who I was dating at 25 I'd be divorced now. [/quote]

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