I was born in 1990 to parents who had just turned 36 years of age. Many I know had parents who were in their mid to late 30s when they were born in the early 1990s. From what I have read, I’m not alone: Most of the “Millenial” Generation’s parents were Baby Boomers. Also, around the time of my birth (late 1980s-early 1990s) you had tons of baby oriented movies coming out and being big hits - Look Whose Talking, Twins, and Baby Boom to name a few.
Question is, why did Boomer Dopers settle down and start having kids so late, relatively speaking?
The Women’s Rights movement in the seventies. Prior to that women were generally expected to get married and have children while their husbands went out and built a career. As women had increased career opportunities of their own, they took them. Having children got deferred. Then when these women realized that having a child was something that couldn’t be deferred indefinitely, a lot of them had children in their thirties and forties.
We didn’t have the money before then.
That’s how it was for me. Heck, if I had the kind of student loan debt people do now, I might never have had kids.
Hmm, around here all of my friends’ parents are my parents’ age (born around '48-'52) and we were all born when our parents were in their late 20s (so, the late 70s).
I wonder how much of a role Vietnam played in the divide between my experience (child of early Boomers, who had kids in their 20s) and the OP’s (child of slightly later Boomers, who had in their 30s).
Maybe it’s not a Vietnam thing, it’s a Rust Belt thing. Not too many of my friends’ dads went to Vietnam (my dad did) but most didn’t go to college either. They did come from a quintessential postwar suburb with “ticky tacky” houses, and their parents had kids when they were in their 20s and it was still the thing to do around here.
I can imagine if you were a boomer and went to college then started a career, you’d wait til your 30s to get going. But around here, in the lower middle class, you had your factory job and your wife quit her job at Woolworth’s at the age of 25 to stay home and raise the kids. There was nothing better coming along, nothing to wait for.
In fact, in the even-lower-middle-class that my mom’s sisters occupy, they had their kids even younger than my mom did, in their early 20s.
My daughter was a half generation later, but she had her only child at 42. Reasons? At first she just like to have best boyfriend. Then around 2002 (she was 36) she settled down with one. Maybe she was tired of just playing the field; I don’t know (she had made it clear that any question about her sex life was totally off-limits). When she and her BF moved in together (she had never done that before) she said, “Now don’t expect us to get married.” When they did get married two years later, she said, “Now don’t expect us to have children.” A couple years later they decided to have children but she was now 40. After a couple rounds of IVF it took and she got pregnant (at first with twins, but one of them miscarried) and now has a beautiful son who is about to be 10.
So the answer seems to be that she was having too much fun not settling down. Until the music stopped. She was also having a good career. I think that was part of it.
My parents are the bleeding edge of the Boomers (a touch before). I was born when my mother was 23 and my dad was 21.
My husband and I are the tail end of the Boomers (technically the year after). We had our kids when we were 30 and 32.
Differences - I was expected to go to college. My mother wasn’t. I had a starter marriage. My parents married young and are still married - even though my father was nearly as stupid as a young man as my ex was. My parents had zero fertility issues - I struggled to conceive. My parents could afford a home to raise kids in on my Dad’s starter salary - and their expectations for that home were modest. I wanted to be living in a house with enough bedrooms by the time my kids were born. When I arrived, my parents expected college expenses for me to be similar to what my Dad had. When my son arrived, we opened up college funds and started sticking money aside knowing he’d need it if he was going to go to college without a lot of debt. When I was born, hormonal birth control was not yet common, diaphragms and IUDs were normal, both me and my baby sister were “surprises” - when I was a young adult, it was not common to have an oops baby - my youngest is a surprise, but only because we’d given up after four years of trying.