Teenage Kicks

An interesting take on the so-called teenage ‘pregnancy pact’ by Christopher Caldwell at the FT.

Having a baby is not sad. The reason not to have a baby in your teens is the risk that it will spoil something in your future – maybe your family life, your career or your economic prospects. In their landmark study of unmarried mothers, Promises I Can Keep, the US sociologists, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, noted that poor women need a “reason to wait” if they are to delay having children. It had better be a good reason. Time flies, after all. Whether or not a teenager’s having a child is a misfortune, teenagers themselves may see it as a lesser misfortune than a 40-year-old’s wishing for a child she cannot have.

Perhaps the current trend of ‘richer’ women having babies later and putting their careers first is a mistake, it does seem to lead to no end of problems from adequate childcare to fertility problems and other difficulties associated with births to older women, such as the increased risk of disability.

Poorer, less well-educated women, as Caldwell, states have no such option, so maybe that is why we do seem to have more born at the lower end of the social spectrum. It is – of course also more ‘natural’ for women to have their children at a young age.

I wonder if it could link to the extended adolescence and binge drinking and casual sex that seems much more common these days. Could delaying having children in some way delay one’s own growth into adulthood?

In my day, back in the 1960s-80s, there was only a seemingly brief period between reaching adulthood and ‘settling down’ in marriage for everyone from the working class and the middle-class, except maybe for those relative few who went to university, and even they it was only a delay of around 5 years or so before they did the same.

For any person male or female over the age of about 18 the commonest questions were about boyfriends or girlfriends, and when they were going to get married. Marriage was a fixed central point, and the next step was supposed to be – after a year or two – children.

I was thinking the other day about whether - what we could call - my generation might be the last generation to regard marriage as a normal – essential even – signpost in life. The question then is whether without those – signposts – stages in life, life tends to lose meaning, shape and structure becoming the morass we see only too often around us in lives that have broken down that way.