Reply to Millennial women are saying no thanks to parenthood

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think it's really about the expectations for parenting.  You can't have kids and keep living your pre-kids life without being branded a bad parent.  As soon as you have kids, your life becomes kid-centric with playgroups, music classes, sports practices, and on and on.  If you aren't interested in this shift, then you don't have kids.  In prior generations, people just ignored their kids and went on with their adult lives.[/quote]

In prior generations, people married and had kids much earlier. Most people didn't go to college and move to a big city to live in an apartment and go out with friends and have adventures. Most people married someone they met in high school or college, settled in the region where they grew up, and maybe worked for a year or two before having kids, or simply had them right away. Their adult lives WERE marriage and kids. The ship they experienced was from being a child, or maybe a student, to being a wife/husband and a mom/dad.

Even as recently as 1990, over half of all women were married by the age of 24. Men skewed slightly older but only slightly -- still over 40% of all men were married by 24.

Anyway, in prior generations people didn't "go on" with their adult lives when they had kids. Kids WERE their adult lives. Also, because people were so much younger when they married and had kids, they were more connected (and often physically much closer) to their families of origin, plus their parents were younger, often in their late 40s or early 50s. So it was easier for parents in those generations to have social lives, because they had stronger support systems and more of a "village."[/quote]

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