And had a good economic position for marriage.

Your kids get to spend more time with their grandparents and great-grandparents, and you get to spend more time with your grandkids and great-grandkids down the road. Also, if you get married in your early twenties and have your kids fast, they are basically raised by the time you are in your early 40's. You still have some good years left for travel and activities.

My grandparents and parents had their kids young, and we had a close, fun family. My ex and I had our kids late, and I now think everyone missed out on a lot.

I got married and had my first child at 17, my second child at 19.

I wasn't old enough, AND didn't have the background family experience, to know what a good marriage was, let alone how to choose someone to spend the rest of my life with. I was married, that first time, for ten years. Ten years of HELL. My kids and I suffered, and then we struggled together as a single-parent family.

I adore my adult sons, and love our time together. We are able to have a lot of fun, and spend a lot of time, together as adults. Maybe more than we would have. If I could do ANYTHING differently in my life, though, it would have been to finish my education and establish a stable life, married or not, BEFORE bringing kids into it. They deserved a more stable childhood. They were fortunate in that one of their parents, me, was hard-working, responsible, and there for them. They still deserved better.

I have 2 failed marriages behind me. I've come to the conclusion that marriage shouldn't be a goal; if one is able to find someone who will make a loving, reliable, trustworthy partner, that's great. A well-lived life should not, though, depend on that, and people who come out of dysfunctional families, who have never SEEN or experienced healthy relationships, are probably going to have a hard time having healthy relationships in their own lives.

My sons? Neither, as adults, are married. Both have loving SOs. One has a child from a previous relationship that he has full custody of and is raising himself. What is his greatest regret? That he didn't wait for a healthy relationship, that his child was grievously harmed by an abusive, dysfunctional biological mother.

I agree with basically everything you are saying. I would try to combine the education and relationship maturity with as much overlap as possible with extended family. That increases your odds of getting good skills modeled. I had a lot of really awful emotional blind spots and skill deficiencies and probably still do. I could have used having a lot of other family members in my kids' lives to back me up.

But yes, I am completely in agreement with getting your education, establishing finances, and being in a healthy relationship first. I do wish that interpersonal effectiveness and raising children were given serious attention in the educational system. Those are utterly vital, and I think they don't come naturally in our current version of modern life. I had no idea what I didn't know. I assumed everything would just come to me. To a large extent it did, of course, just years after I really needed it.

Children born out of wedlock is running around 40%.

in 1890. My hubby and I were much younger than that when we married in the 1980's. But yeah, I get the larger point. The younger people I work with now in their late twenties, early thirties are not even thinking about marriage.

Without contraception, family planning largely consists of "don't live together, so you don't have sex very often". So if a lot of people needed to wait before they were secure enough in a job to raise a family, they did. A slight decrease up 1920, then an increase in 1930 and 1940, also mirrors economic confidence, as does the big drop in median age for 1950. After that, contraception starts taking effect, meaning the link between sex and children is no longer so strong, and couples don't wait for economic security before sex.

That's my simple answer. Other, more complex explanations may be available, but I think the declining standard of living of most Americans is the root cause of this phenomenon.

-Laelth

It's tough on married couples, and brutal on those with children.

Took that long to find a woman who didn't have a sense of smell....

IMO people see the divorce rate. Get married young and you will have a very high chance of divorce. May as well put it off to cut down on the lawyers' fees. This is a good thing.

It was fairly common for men to wait until they were established, whether that be in a career, on land of their own for farming/ranching, or having settled and become citizens after immigration. Since women weren't expect to do those things before marriage, families were glad to have them betrothed by their late teens.

The post WWII average age drop for men is potentially related to the GI Bill with its educational and homeownership benefits for the throngs of returning vets and the better opportunities provided by the booming post-war economy.

It's also interesting to see how the women's average started climbing at a time when civil rights and women's rights were in the forefront.

I'd love to see a real analysis of it. I'm sure I'm missing other factors influencing the trends.

Women don't need to wait for the man to be established as they have their own careers. That is really a good thing. You can get along better with someone closer to your age.