Why No One Grows Up Anymore—And What’s to Blame

I'm early Gen-X and I was raised to grow up SLOOOOOOOOOOOOW. "Don't do anything that could limit your choices later." "Don't commit to anything just because it looks exciting now." This part isn't really accurate: > He was of course right. People did age younger then. They had to. We used to consider people adults at 18. Now, at 27 or even their early thirties, many are still on the runway, not yet cleared for takeoff. The median age for first marriage in the US is 30.2 for men and 28.6 for women. Meaning half are even below those numbers. The first child median age is 27.3 years old. Those numbers are all going up, but there are millions of parents in their 20s. > There’s a reason people used to marry young. It wasn’t naivety. It was the simple fact that they could: there were jobs, houses, and social frameworks to support early independence. Not really. So: back then, they HAD to get married early, It was the only way to afford anything. Especially for women who couldn't enter the workforce like men could. What option did they have? Now, women can get jobs, get their own apartments, and aren't pretty much forced to find a husband in order to get out of their parents' house. Was affording things easier? Yes. But the lack of options for women (or was it the desire of men to have wives locked down) drove the coupling, not the abundance of material. *Even today* it's much cheaper to get married and live with someone. So why aren't more people doing that? Those are my own two real quibbles with the article.