I think this is a good point. I was pregnant at 21 and I was treated pretty terribly by perfect strangers for being young, unmarried, and knocked up.

That being said, I am a great mom and my kids are the best things that have happened to me in my life.

And THAT being said, being a young mom is very isolating. I can’t relate to people my age who are still at the bar every night and I can’t relate to other moms who are mostly 10+ years older than me.

Wink, wink.

I had my daughter when I was 20, married at 21 and a few months later gave birth to my son. I was sooooo young. While I love my husband beyond reason, I often wonder what would have happened if we had chose to wait to marry…and just kept procreating. Snicker.

I hope my own kids wait a bit longer before getting married, but I would certainly support them if they chose to walk the same path their parents did.

though … i was talking to my 18 year old niece over the summer and she has tons of friends the same age who already have babies and she said she felt too young, like maybe she should wait a couple of years … and then i remembered that in the town where i grew up most of the people i knew (well girls anyway) started having babies by the time they were 20, lots earlier and they were mostly wonderful mothers ~ it just wasn’t for me and i guess i wanted a different life …

though 25 still feels young to me ~ maybe i was immature because i don’t have a sense that i knew who i was back then … of course that’s me looking back 10+ years …

Christy, i know a woman just like your cousin, whose firstborn – born when she was 17 – just turned 11 yesterday. she’s a fierce mama…and like most of us in any case, just doin’ the best she can. but the young moms, i think, still have it waaaay harder than they would have 30 years ago – because their expectations & role models are NOT the same, generally….and the isolation of parenthood is hard, even when not coupled with the defensive isolation of being part of a minimized discourse of family that is seldom accorded unquestioned respect, and the literal isolation of not having access to decent-paying work anywhere in your legal future.

these are the things that make me sad for my young relatives having babies. the rest? meh. mostly a strange envy, because i do really think that the ten years i spent trying to construct meaning in life without kids will serve my children well in the long run…but mostly to me the choice is an abdication…i want to raise kids who know they matter.

I think what IS a lie is the nuclear family. How we became so fixated on it, I don’t know. If it was the solution to all problems then hell, how’d we end up with so many in the first place?

And I sit on the fence with teen mothers myself, sadly. I knew people in high school who had children and LOVED it-they wanted those children and went on to be incredible mothers. Why parenting, and mothering specifically, is the one job we think no kid would ever dare want is beyond me.

I didn’t even notice the census was out though. Silly me. Haven’t been watching the news much lately.

i had my son when i was 25 (eep ~ so young, so very very young) a happily married statistic that became a happily divorced statistic though we got to help pave co-parenting and friendly divorces and then i was happily unmarried co-habitating when i had my twins only to somehow manage to marry last year, you know in order to stay cool and separate from the herd ;-)

I shudder to think of myself becoming a mom at 2 or so, but then my mom had me when she was 22. Times were different then though. I think that emotionally many kids just aren’t as mature. I know I wasn’t forced to be and so I wasn’t. But becoming a parent probably changes that.

This was so lovely to read. I’ve noticed the media reports but have largely ignored them because I can’t get over the sensationalism the media uses to spin it. It reminded me of the time that some study predicted that Caucasians would be in the minority in big Canadian cities by 2015. There was a creepy aura of panic about it that pissed me off. I mean, it’s perhaps interesting from a demographic perspective, but why is that big news?