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It's not, but we've worked REALLY hard to do it.
Fair point.
This brings in the uncomfortable idea that there might need to be punishments and negative consequences for these anti-family forces for all they've done.
I didn't touch on that one in the screed up there but, uh, there will probably be some portion of the population that will keep trying to undermine family formation, and our policies should also be keeping them at bay too.
Physical removal, so to speak?
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I don't know if punishment is necessary; step one would be to get them out of the driver's seat and see what happens. The bigger problem is it's widely agreed that delay IS necessary; even among natalists, very few are going to think that a girl having a baby before finishing high school is a good idea. And that amount of delay might be tolerable. But I think expecting delay until after undergrad ends up just building in the habit of delay past the point of biological baby-craziness.
And if you want this to work without too many bad side effects, you're going to want the father to be married to the mother, too, which would be a big change as well; the model of the residential university would either go away or change a LOT. The larger problem may well be intractable.
I read this and think of my parents: Mom was fresh out of high school in the late 1970s when she married Dad, who is just two years older than her, and was already in the workforce (having dropped out of high school after 10th grade). Just a few years later, in the early 1980s, Mom pops me out a few weeks before her 22nd birthday; my first brother a year and a half later; and then my other brother, her youngest, just a couple of days after turning 26. And this family of 5 lived entirely off my Dad's handyman income, with Mom being a SAHM, and not entering the workforce proper until Youngest Brother was out of high school.
And this was just a few decades ago, not some ancient days of yore here. So really, I'd say the issue is simply the whole everyone-goes-to-college things. Is that bachelor's degree really necessary to do the job? If so, would it still be necessary if we hadn't devalued high school diplomas with "social promotion," grade inflation, and so on?
(Again, I keep coming back to how many of our problems would be solved if we got someone in power who went after Academia with an approach somewhere in the range from Henry VIII to Qin Shi Huang.)
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Not the most familiar with it, but I seem to recall someone describing to me that BYU is particularly supportive of students having families. I don't remember the details there, though.
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Congrats, you’ve discovered why the modal marriage arrangement throughout history was ‘teenaged girl with an older man’.
If you think we’re going to bring that back, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The fact of the matter is that at least part of the reason that 20 year old brides are so rare is the dearth of young, college aged men ready to be husbands. I suspect destigmatizing age gap relationships would boost the fertility rate dramatically. So start a TikTok trend of bragging about silver Fox husbands or something, I don’t know how you’re going to replicate the social conditions(aka patriarchy) that convinced young women in historical societies to marry older men.
In a word? Inflation.
Sure, there's some snark there, but there's a lot of stories from the Depression about wild age gap relationships just due to economic realities.
I am close to convince that the American economy of the next 20 - 30 years is utterly bifurcated. Zero "middle class." An utter divide between permanently dependent on the state for near serfdom conditions, and the independently able who are literally starting companies with the help of AI overnight and have more money than they know what to do with. The upper class status games will start to get very strange.
I certainly don’t think there’s nothing to this- my great-grandparents married at 17 and thirty because he was a millionaire in the early depression- but the pattern of ‘young woman seeks marriage to established man for economic reasons’ is one that our culture lacks the inclination towards- we have near-unlimited personal debt, a constant diet of TikTok fear porn about abusive men, and a much smaller gap in gender based economic prospects.
I also strongly doubt the narrative that artificial stupidity will be an economic wonderwaffe- a few people, disproportionately already very wealthy, will become even more wealthy from selling it as customer service improvements and it still won’t be able to turn on a wrench or supervise a construction site or get around all sorts of occupational licensing barriers.
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The age gap has rarely been more than 5 years, and you have to go back hundreds of years before average age of a woman at her first marriage was under 20. Teenagers weren't generally marrying "silver foxes" (though it happened).
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