I’m not having kids at 25, I don’t care how fertile I am! And I also don’t consider 25 to be “old”. I just got my first apartment. I’m single and I’m enjoying myself. Just the IDEA that she’s telling 25-year olds to hurry up and decide about children is disgusting. Let’s everyone rush into decisions based on aging anxiety- especially something as permanant and life-altering as children. That’s not a decision to make for any reason other than, “I really want to be a parent”. Not, “I might not have another chance, guess I should try it out.”
Thank you! That’s a response that makes me think.
Another thing you’re forgetting, NightRabbit, is that plenty of people don’t go to college after high school. In the types of farm towns I grew up in, quite a few people go to their high school graduation party, wake up the next day and go straight into their blue collar trade for the next however many decades. These people tend to grow up quite a bit more quickly than their college counterparts, for the simple reason that they support themselves at a much earlier age.
Also, if you’re working on a farm, you might very well need that family sooner rather than later. Ever try to maintain a farm all by yourself? Now imagine doing it when you’re 50. It’s just not possible.
But the farm example is an exception to the rule. Most of the people from this rural blue collar background are squared away and know what they’re doing. Many of them have helped support their immediate families since the age of eleven, so I’d trust their judgement in marriage and family matters as much as I’d trust that of a forty year old. It’s not all college kids getting married at that age by a long shot, and hell, according to the stats posted here, even the college kids will probably do OK.
Just chill.
Glad I could help. Thinking tends to be a good thing to do most of the time, I’ve noticed. 
Ok, I guess my experience is primarily with the more self-centered, middle-class college sector.
Several people have asked, but you haven’t really answered:
What’s it to you? Why are you so worked up about this?
I dated my husband for 8 years, lived with him for a few of those, been married for 10 years, and I still think you’re on crack. Let people figure out for themselves what is best for them, just like you want to be left to make your own decisions.
My parents knew each other four years before they got married, though they didn’t date that entire time. They were 18 when they married. I think they’ve been married for 35 years (I can’t ever remember exactly).
I knew my husband less than a year before we decided to get married, and we only gave our parents seven weeks notice before the wedding, so the total time from start of dating to marriage was just a tiny bit over a year. We were 20 and 21. Our 14th anniversary is coming up next year.
I thought by the time you’re 25, you get out of that teenage “I know all, my opinion is fact” stage of life. I guess there are exceptions to everything, though.
My husband is one year, one month, and one day older than me.
I find it distressing the way we’re increasingly infantilizing teenagers. They can’t possibly be responsible for anything they do, because they’re just children. We have to protect them, and sue the school for not making them valedictorian, and hire them tutors to make them study and give them allowances and buy them cars and blah, blah, blah.
And now I see this same sort of infantilization extending into people in their 20s. You’re an adult now. You can drink, shoot people for the government, pick the government, have sex in hotel rooms you’ve rented yourself, buy property, waste your income on credit card debt and sign legally binding contracts. If you don’t know yourself by now, when did you plan on starting to get acquainted?
The kinds of things you mention like whether one of you might eventually decide you want o leave New York City are:
a) The sort of thing that can crop up in any relationship at any time, even if you date your boyfriend until you both collect social security and then get married. Maybe he won’t like the retirement home you pick.
b) Kind of lame if they’re the sort of thing you see as eventually breaking up a loving marriage over. Loving couples make compromises on where and how to live in order to be with each other.
Whether you’re having kids, sure, that’s a pretty important thing, and I think you’d want to be relatively sure of your position on the issue before you committed to someone else who was relatively sure. But if you’re not set on it one way or the other by the time you’re 25, (and you’re not in denial), the likelihood that you will suddenly decide ‘ZOMG! Must have kids! If husband doesn’t want, must divorce!’ seems fairly low.
It seems to me that the people who’ve got a romanticized, idealized view of marriage are not young people who think ‘I love him, he loves me, we can make it work’ but people like you who think ‘If I just hold out long enough, I will find my exact match, and we will marry and never fight about anything because we will both know precisely what we want and never change forever and ever, amen.’ Your marriage, whenever you decide to go forward with it, is going to take work and compromise and changes for both of you. If you think you can avoid that by waiting until the magical day when you both know absolutely for sure what you want now and will want for the rest of your life (other than each other), it’s going to be a single life for you.
I’m not telling you to have kids at 25. I’m telling you you need to make that decision fairly quickly - especially if your boyfriend is certain he doesn’t want kids. As Manda JO said, the time between 25 and 30 will go very quickly - and between 30 and 40 will go more quickly. You’ve made the case that you are not someone who is going to marry a guy within weeks of meeting him - so if you decide you want kids and your boyfriend is certain he doesn’t, you have several years of courtship ahead of you before you can even start trying (assuming you are traditional and want kids AND marriage - I have a girlfriend who just decided to become a single mom in her 30s because Mr. Right wasn’t showing up). There is nothing wrong with staying childless - there is something sad about regretting being childless.
I think there are two big mistakes people make in their early/mid twenties - the first is what you are pitting - the belief that being 21 means you need to take on all the responsibilities and attributes of being a grown up - rushing into marriage, kids and mortgage before you are ready for it. The second is what you are doing, believing at 25 that you have plenty of time to still get marriage, mortgage and kids.
Look at it a different way - instead of kids, look at being a homeowner. Most people will get a 30 year mortgage. Most people are going to want to have that paid off by the time they retire - say 65. That means you need to be in the home you pay off and get that mortgage at 35. Yet, I have a lot of friends buying their first home in their 40s, or buying their second home with an upgrade 30 year mortgage. At 35 you still think you have lots of time, but when talking 30 year mortgage, you really don’t. (Most of them will need to downsize at retirement - or continue to work).
Retirement is the same - at 25 a lot of people don’t put money aside for retirement - its such a long way away. But it doesn’t ever get any easier to start, and you’ll be surprised how fast it comes up on the horizon.
I agree that 25 isn’t “old”, and I also agree that people shouldn’t rush into decisions based on aging anxiety. Fortunately, no one here is telling them to. No one here has said “hurry up and have kids”. Some people have simply mentioned that 25 is not too early to start *thinking * about whether or not you *want * kids.
And please explain to me how the IDEA of telling 25 year olds they should maybe start thinking about whether or not they want children is more “disgusting” than telling grown people whether they should or shouldn’t get married.
Remove the last three letters of the sentence, then you’ll have it right.
My own experience (mine and my girlfriend’s) says the chance is better than 50% if you are UNCERTAIN at 25 that you will decide you want kids. Maybe not enough to divorce, but enough to have regrets. If you don’t want kids at 25, they chance you’ll suddenly want kids is low. I’m reading NightRabbit’s “I don’t want kids now but I might change my mind” as not someone who has made the decision definitively to remain childless.
I’m pitting rushing into marriage like people have pitted certain religious beliefs in the past- it seems ubiquitous to me, I think it’s a stupid idea, and I don’t understand why everyone’s doing it.
Meanwhile, I’m not buying a house at 25, either. God. The idea that you need to buy a house at 25 is absurd. Since when is everything supposed to be done in one’s early to mid 20s? When do you suggest that people rent, find a stable job without the pressure of supporting a family, date, figure out who/what you’re compatible with, etc.? But no. It’s rush rush rush! You’ll be old soon! Get married! Buy a house! Have kids! Jesus Christ. Whatever timeline you people are following that has you married and burdened with a house and kids right out of college? Leave me off it.
I don’t want kids nor is my life ready for kids, now. I can’t imagine myself as a parent- although I realize that some people have been imagining themselves as a parent since they got their first period. It’s not something so important to me that I’m going to rearrange my life or plans in order to accomodate. I’m not saying that, when I eventually do get married and stay in the same place for a while, the yen for a family isn’t going to crop up. I mean, it might happen.
Did you leave out the part where someone put a gun to your head and ordered you to take your vows when you wrote your OP, or are you being kind of shrill?
Well, I guess you’re pitting me, too. I got married at 18–ten days after I graduated. I met my husband when I was 15 and he was 18. He was my first boyfriend. I was his first girlfriend. We kinda always knew we were getting married, but we didn’t always expect to get married at 18. The timing was a matter of necessity. Not for health insurance, though. My parents were not going to help at all with college. As far as they were concerned, when I hit 18, I was on my own. But the government doesn’t see it that way. I knew I was going to be fucked when it came to financial aid if I had to fill out my parents’ info on the FAFSA. There’s a huge difference, financial aid wise, between 20,000/year and 100,000/year.
So we got married, moved 600 miles away from my nearest family, to Los Angeles of all places, and started trying to muddle through. My husband put me through school, and I graduated shortly before our 4th anniversary. Then he supported me for a year while I decided I wanted to be a writer and wanted to work on that full time. Then he supported me when I decided I wanted to move to Utah and go to grad school. We’ve been married for 6.5 years now, known each other for almost 10, and we’re still pretty damned happy. I’ll be finished with my education in the spring, and then I get to return the favor and help put him through school.
Here’s a hint for you, NightRabbit–something you probably should have learned in college. Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t make it wrong. Your inability to grasp a concept does not invalidate the concept.
Also, being married doesn’t mean you have to be burdened with a house and kids. I have neither a house nor kids. I rent, and we have 2 cats. Being married hasn’t hindered my freedom. I haven’t had to give up a single one of my goals. I travel when I want to travel and do things I want to do. I’ve accomplished everything I’ve wanted to accomplish because of my husband not in spite of him. I seriously kinda wonder what sort of fucked-up beliefs about marriage you have. It’s not a prison sentence. I don’t have a metaphorical (or real) ball-and-chain attached to my ankle. My best friend is always nearby and I always have a date. It’s pretty nice.
I wish I could have bought a house at 25. It was 2000, and I was in the Bay Area- the housing prices were going up 20% a year for a couple of years after that.
No one is telling you that you need to buy a house at 25. And once again, not everyone values things the same way. I’m a homeowner, but I don’t find it burdensome. I find it freeing that I’m not paying rent to someone else, I’m building equity.
I’m getting the sense that you feel pressure to get married at this point. Outside of what’s happening in this thread, is that true? If it is I would find that really interesting. Assuming you mean NYC by “Gotham” we’re the same age and live about 100 miles apart. I felt a lot of pressure NOT to get married in my early 20s. Not from people I knew well, but from random people who didn’t really know me, and thought getting married at my age is always a bad idea (sound familiar?). Maybe conversations like this just lead to polarization, with everyone defending their own choices.
I don’t read Dangerosa as saying “decide and HAVE children” at 25, she’s saying “25 is a good age to think about whether you would like to have children in the future because it gives you enough time to plan your life accordingly.”
I have some relatives who put off the child question for years and then suddenly decided at the last minute (in terms of her fertility) to go for it. They actually ended up with two kids, then they got divorced. Both children are genetically blessed with incredible intellect and athletic skill, both have everything they could possibly want, but the oldest is ten, they’re being raised by a sixty-year old, and they’ve both been in therapy since before they started kindergarten.
Of course, plural of anecdote is not data, etc., but I think this illustrates some of Dangerosa’s points and it also references some of the points made by F.U. Shakespeare. In the case of my relatives, since they were both loaded, they thought that they were set because addressing money concerns was the only “preparation” needed to have children. There’s a lot of psychological preparation involved as well. I’m a college professor, and while the vast majority of kids I see with older parents are no more screwed up than your average college kid, some of these kids are fucked up beyond belief by their crazy parents. One particular student, who owes her existence to science as much as anything else, has had a few breakdowns because her parents have let her know that because they waited until the eleventh hour, she is their one shot and she had better not screw things up and make them look bad. (Her mother actually said this to the mother of another one of my students who is also an only child, thinking the second student’s mother would understand!).
Granted, there are a lot of causal factors at work here, but I don’t see how sitting down as a 25 year-old and saying to oneself, “Self, in six years, statistically, there will be a slight decline in your ability to have chlidren. However, in about ten years, your ability to have children naturally will decline precipitously and that health risks also increase for women who have babies after age 35. Given these things, Self, it would seem that you have about a decade to decide whether or not to have children naturally. Do you want children now? When do you want them? At 30? What do you have to do in the next five years? Do you want to have children as part of a family? How will finding the man you want to start a family with affect your career path, your ability to pursue your favorite hobbies and your ability to live where you choose? Is there a point where you will consider single motherhood if you do not find a suitable partner? If you have a child when you are 32, you will be fifty when the child goes to college and fifty-four when s/he graduates (theoretically). How does that fit in with your vision of where you want to be in your early fifties? Are you willing to consider the medical procedures often necessary to have a child in your forties? How will that decision affect your vision of what your sixties would be like?”
I’m 26 and I’ve had to force myself to have the preceding talk with myself, even though right now I’m convinced that I don’t want children (big children are OK, but small children are not my cup of tea…the mileage of others may vary and I have nothing but the highest respect for those who consciously and carefully raise children). Still, and this is always in the back of my mind, what if do a 180? Am I doing things now that will affect my ability to be a good parent in five or ten years? If the answer to that question is yes (which it is), when do I re-evaluate things? At 28? 30? Will there be a point in my life where I have to say to myself, “Even if you wake up tomorrow and want kids more than anything you’ve ever wanted before, the choices you’ve made in your life and your declining window of fertility are going to make it very difficult, if not impossible, to conceive and properly raise a child, so natural children are no longer a go”?
I really don’t see anyone as saying “have kids now!” I think all that Dangerosa is saying is that imagining yourself as a new parent at 30 or 35, even if you’re not 100% sure about whether or not you want children, will help you answer a lot of questions, make important decisions and begin plans that will benefit you, your child, and your family, should you choose to have a child within the context of a family.