To think the encouragement to delay real life is a big cause in the explosion of mental health issues in under 35's ?

[rudolphrainbownose]

Okay, so there is a well documented mental health crisis amongst young people , particularly university students, needing mental health support.

Is it just me or is the current culture of delaying "real adulthood" ( staying at school longer, young marriage/ pregnancy actively discouraged and frowned upon, uni unofficially taking the school leaving age to 23 for middle class young people, staying living at their parents well into their late 20's/ early 30's....)

To me it seems discouraging starting real adult life is fuelling this.

1. Young women are told not to expect "security" in relationships, they are almost told to expect being ghosted by a series of men "not wanting to put a label on it," and going on a series of disastrous online dates is better than settling down young. Look how much marriage amongst under 25's is frowned upon on Mumsnet.

But I don't see many aspects of the dating scene today, ("friends with benefits" being cool, sex often expected without commitment before or afterwards on the first couple of dates, having to actually spell out you don't want the guy you are dating online to continue dating others online, being ghosted and blocked for no reason, being particularly healthy for the mental health of young people). Yet this is sold to them as more empowering than settling down into a steady relationship at a relatively young age....

2. I'll expect to be flamed for this, but the active discouragement of having children in your 20's , probably robs a lot of women of a focus, ( because having your own family is often a nice focus), than drifting around without a purpose gives them. This also leads to probably more people experiencing the panic of miscarriage and infertility , ( risks increasing with age), into their 30's.

3. Active encouragement into University without thinking often leads to a horrendously mentally unhealthy lifestyle.

For those with a passion for the subject, or doing a vocational course that leads to a career, of course university should be supported.

But that is not the case for your average student. Your average student goes to uni because, broadly speaking, it's what their college or sixth form expects of anyone vaguely academic. They pick a subject with no fixed career that they are at best, vaguely interested in, ( managed to scrape a B in business studies A Level, hated it the least, so I'll do it at uni to delay working for three years).

They head to uni to study a subject they are not particularly interested in, ith no idea what it will lead to afterwards. Most, have at most, six hours a week contact time, ( often less post covid). They sleep in late, browse the internet and get smashed a few times a week, ( the majority of students I know do not work in term time). Rinse and repeat. And they wonder why living this not very appealing lifestyle leaves students at poor risk of mental health ? And many are encouraged to take on a masters in a subject they are not interested in, with no direct career, to delay entering the real world for another year. They live in a bubble with people of the same age and inexperience as them. Compare that to a 19 year old office juniour being up and about, learning about the world of work, going for after work drinks with colleagues of a variety of ages ?

And the housing crisis means they are still likely to be living at home, ( especially if they are single), until 30. Often treated like overgrown teenagers, still in the habit of explaining to their parents where they are going of an evening. My friend , ( male), was explaining to me that at 28 he was working himself up to staying the night at his new girlfriends as he was so embarrassed to explain where he was to his parents, ( because if he told them he wouldn't be home for dinner as he was staying at his girlfriend's , they'd realise he was having sex).

In short, is delaying marriage, babies, work , moving out and leaving education actually causing everyone to be directionless and unhappy ?

And in most cases it’s publicly funded via student loan.

@rudolphrainbownose Youre being VV unreasonable to describe women who have don’t have children in their 20s as drifting around without a purpose. What on earth do you think about women who choose to never have kids?

Im mid 30s and child free, I spent my 20s building my career, travelling the world, meeting people, learning skills and generally having a great time. I have had a very full and fulfilling life so far. I only have one friend who had kids in her 20s - everyone else I know waited until mid-30s or chooses not to have kids. All have very different but interesting lives. I wouldn’t swap places with my friend who had kids in her 20s, but she seems happy, and I’d never criticise or look down on her life choices.

100% wrong.

I'm 33. Didn't go to university through choice. Chose to go straight into work instead. Been working from the age of 18. Saved up, bought a house, had a baby. Still working.

Yet I have been taking anti depressants for the past 3 years.

I didn't avoid real life and still struggle with my mental health, and am in the age bracket you describe.

Oh, and ‘real life’ isn’t what your seemingly narrow definition of it is @rudolphrainbownose. I had a real life in my 20s child-free, travelling to places most people will never see, and going out every weekend with my friends.

Mid thirties is very late to start having kids? Heard it all now.

@TheLostNights Only one of my friends started her family before 30, and she was 29! I agree it's silly to suggest that mid-30's is late to start a family, BUT having said that, if you do experience fertility issues, it will get harder as you age, and you need to be prepared for that.

I'm an only child, because my Mum chose to have me at 38 - it was a deliberate choice, she loved her career and wanted to get to a certain level before having a family. She simply didn't get pregnant again, despite trying for several years and started menopause on the early side. Knowing this, I chose to try for a family in my early 30's, in case I was similar. As it happens, I'm not! 😂

I'm one of the people you're talking about OP. Married at 32, first home at 34 first baby at 35. I'm now 35.

Delaying marriage, babies, leaving parents house, buying housing isn't a choice. Housing has become so expensive that it took me all of my 20s to save up enough money for my half of a deposit. And I had been saving from my first proper paycheck at the age of 21 (after uni).

I didn't meet my husband to be until the age of 29, but we both had enough money at that point to buy.

How can people settle down in their 20s with 2.4 children and a mortgage when Housing costs are so expensive?

What would give people focus is being able to buy a home on a normal income in your 20s. Just like generations past could. Everything else - the marriage kids etc for lots of people is only an option when you can put roots down and have the security of home ownership.

I think lack of boundaries. Everyone having their truth and their lived experience in the place of facts, lack of social cohesion on an agreed set of norms and rules has been a driving force in the increase in poor mental health

I'm still curious about where you fit into this world view, OP. What's your own situation and experience? Are you one of these people who, in your view, drifted without purpose through your twenties waiting for real life to start, and you're now trying to make sense of why you're struggling with your mental health? Or did you skip uni and get married/have kids very young and you're now trying to justify why you think this was the best choice/convince yourself that you didn't miss out?

I don’t think this is a new phenomenon. I was engaged at 20, house at 21 and married at 23. This was 2000-2003. People my age were horrified. Couldn’t understand why I was doing it. Yet older women I knew in the workplace were really supportive of my choices, possibly because they were similar to ones they had made.

I watched a lot of my peers go through lots of short term relationships in their twenties. I saw some break up with really lovely young men because they were ‘too young to settle down’ and he wasn’t ‘the one’. Honestly, they seemed really unhappy. They continued to live at home through most of their twenties and just seemed like older teens. Around age 32-34, they all suddenly seemed to marry whichever man they were currently dating (often for around 18 months) and have babies very quickly. Some of these men were not nice. Some relationships have lasted, some haven’t.

To add balance, I also know of people who married the same age I did and split. The one thing that seemed to cause an early split was having children young. My DH and I lived together for 14 years before becoming parents. We would have done so sooner, but had fertility issues. However, late 20s/ early 30s was our aim rather than early 20s.

Moving out of home at 21 and owning my own home was the making of me. I am so sad that this isn’t available to the current younger generation. My parents were home owners at 21/24 too back in the 1970s. The were adults. I was an adult at 21.

I mostly agree with you, OP. Job, house, secure relationships should be available rites of passage to 20-somethings. But I do think babies can wait.

What on earth do you think about women who choose to never have kids?
Do keep up. They exist to cover the Christmas shifts.

I get what you're saying.
My DSD is 27, never left home, has gone from one uni course to the other without ever actually getting a job, and still lives at home rent free, it's more like she's 19 than 27. She is very immature for her age and I do think it may be partly because she hasn't ever needed to "grow up". By her age, I was married, had a mortgage and two children, I can't say I was necessarily happier but certainly felt like an adult.

If an 18 year old starts full time work while living at home and saves their money as opposed to spending it in Starbucks, McDonalds, going into town, new clothes and Reading tickets then of course it’s possible for a couple to save enough money as a deposit on a 1 bed flat in 4 years. It depends what’s more important… the new iPhone and spending £70 on a night out with Ubers or getting on the property ladder!
Also biology would indicate that the later you leave trying to conceive the harder it will be. My SIL isn’t the only person I know who left it too late and now she will never have children. I have so many colleagues that spent their 20’s and 30’s partying then couldn’t understand why they couldn’t quickly fall pregnant!
Why do a Physiotherapy degree when there are 4 graduates for every role available! If you live away and take a 3 year course that equates to £50,00-60,000. It’s utter madness. But don’t forget Universities are businesses so they don’t care.
Bottom line, if you want to get on the property ladder work hard, save hard and make sacrifices. If you want children don’t wait until you are in your mid-30’s. Oh and don’t bother wasting years and thousands of £££ on pointless degrees!!! Not judgemental.

Your ideal scenario assumes a lot of things will magically fall into place at a relatively early age:

• That you will meet someone who is reliable, committed, solvent and wants to start a family in his 20s who isn't also a total bore or a controlling arse (and trust me I literally didn't meet a single man who wanted to settle down in my 20s)
• That said man will be happy to support you while you take off several years to raise these children.
• That, should for whatever reason, the marriage not work, you would be able to get back on your feet financially afterwards.

These are quite big ifs.

The big thing missing from your equation is that roughly half of marriages fail these days. You can put this down to hook up culture or fear of commitment or too many people going to university or whatever you think it is but those are facts.

A young woman entering into marriage and child-rearing and just assuming it will all be alright is playing Russian Roulette unless she has some ability to support herself should the domestic setup not work out. Surely a woman with education (even if non vocational) and some work experience behind her is in a better position to deal with this outcome than one who has rushed into an early marriage without preparing the ground for Plan B?

@WifeMotherWorker

Starter affordable 2 bed homes down here are around 360k, a single bed leasehold flat went for 225k or should they move away so we have no young people here?

So between 18 and 22, your subsidised child (not all parents can to afford to feed cloth and heat a adult for free) will need to save a min of 30k and be able to pay around £800 per month in mortgage, then there is energy, food cloths council tax car or work transport.

What jobs with just A levels pay those sorts of salaries and how widely available are they?

Oh yes and on top of all this, they must also have kids - which as we all know are very cheap!!! not!

Pretty sure Physiotherapists can get jobs once qualified.

I think you live in a world where the children of well off parents get on the property ladder and everyone else? well its their fault, too many coffees.

Let's do some maths.

Say you get a starter job paying 20k a year, i.e. 17.5k after deductions, or 1.5k net each month.

Assuming your parents are happy to let you live at home rent free for four years and that you spend very little in that time, you might just save 1000/month, i.e. 48k in four years. This would allow you to buy new clothes from time to time, have a basic phone contract, pay for travel costs, the odd night out or dinner with friends etc. but you probably won't be able to afford a holiday or a car. If you're lucky, your parents might pay for driving lessons and put you on their insurance.

Let's be optimistic and say that at the end of those four years you have been promoted, earning 25k a year and have saved 50k at the age of 22.

You find a bank willing to lend you 4.5x your salary, which is around 120k, giving you a total budget of 170k to get on the property ladder.

So yeah OK, that would get you a starter home in cheaper parts of the country. If you happen to be from a more expensive part of the country you have no realistic prospect of buying anything unless you leave your family, friends and entire support network and move somewhere cheaper.

But that's really your best case scenario, assuming four years of being supported by parents without having to pay rent or bills and living extremely frugally. And then what? You don't have a degree, so unless you work for a company or in an area with really good training and development opportunities, your earning potential is probably going to level off quite early. Meanwhile, you have a fairly high amount of mortgage debt relative to your salary, you're very vulnerable to interest rate rises and you're not getting the kind of pay increases which would normally reduce your risk exposure over time.

None of the above factors in other things you might want to save for either, such as pension contributions or a rainy day/emergency fund.

If you have or find a partner in a similar position to you - which is unlikely at such a young age - and you decide to pool your resources, then yes, you probably could buy a fairly decent home. But that's a big if. In the best of circumstances, money is always going to be a bit tight. If your partner has less money than you then things will be even tighter and you would be better off not marrying, at least in the short term.

Then at the age of 25 you decide to start TTC with the aim of having completed your family by the time they turn 30. What happens after maternity leave? You won't get any help with childcare until your child turns three. If you are from a cheap part of the country and have managed to stay living round the corner from your generous and helpful parents who so kindly let you live at home rent free for four years and they happen to not be working themselves and are happy to provide free childcare, great! Otherwise, you will most likely find that your wage is completely eaten up by childcare costs, leaving your partner to finance those mortgage repayments and all other bills on their own. And that's before you even think about having a second child.

As far as I can tell, that's just about the best case scenario for the kind of person you are describing.

I could have done that. At the age of 18 I was working in a full time job earning 18k a year and living rent free with my parents. I intended to go to uni the following year but I didn't have to. I could have stayed where I was. The company had great training opportunities and decent career progression, even for non graduates. Some of the people I worked with who stayed there have done pretty well for themselves, despite being in an expensive part of the country.

But I didn't do that.

I went to uni, studied one of the useless subjects about which the OP and various others in this thread have been so scathing, with only 6 contact hours per week. I spent too much money on nights out. I spent too much time mucking around and having fun. I graduated with a student debt - admittedly a much smaller one than today's graduates are lumbered with - and a degree in a non-vocational subject with no clear career path. I did a few internships and got a graduate job offer which required two years of additional study before I could start. I spent those two years studying, doing part-time work at weekends and holidays, and travelling when I could. I decided I liked the travelling and put off the graduate job for a further year so I could do a lot more of it. I finally started my career at the age of 25, at the bottom of my overdraft, crashing with a friend for the first couple of months, and without having paid off any of my student loan yet. I didn't even have a boyfriend, much less a husband, and it would be another 8 years before I managed to get on the property ladder. I did make an effort to save money consistently, but I also spent a lot on rent, travel, and another degree which I did part-time whilst working.

And now, in my mid 30s, I am married to the kind of man I never would have had the opportunity to meet if I hadn't done these things, living in a foreign country, I have a child and another one on the way, with a salary that is several times what it would have been if I had stayed on that first career path, and a much more expensive home than I would have otherwise been able to afford.

I made a lot of the choices and did a lot of the things which are being looked down on in this thread, by the OP, you and various other posters, who presumably would have advised me to stay in that first career path and just keep toiling away in an OK job for an OK salary. And yet I am far better off - and had a lot more fun along the way - for having made those choices than I would have been if I'd followed your advice.

I completely agree with this.

I don't want to sound archaic but even in earlier years, they were saying that the best place to meet a high earning spouse is university. the aim of university is not to find a mate but esp when you are talking about buying a home, having a high earning spouse makes a huge difference. In the past, there was a more equal distribution of wealth esp in the 1950s to 1980s- ordinary workers were afforded the chance of home ownership. For my generation, its only 30% and its not because people have student loan debt. It didn't even feature in us getting a mortgage. Its because of the fact that most housing purchases are now partially funded by generational equity (almost everyone I know in London had money from family; and a lot of homes outside London are fbought using the proceeds of London property sales). That is something that is not going to change. So if you don't have that help, you have to outearn your counterparts rather than just blindly saving. The average amount of help my friends got was 100-200k to buy in London (obviously they all went to university; they went to university plus got 100k in help_. How long would it take to save up that money on your own?

In today's day and age, thats no longer the case. Its why my friend working for the council with a partner driving a HGV is still renting a house worth 100k in Yorkshire with no ability to buy her own place; while we bought our flat in London despite it being so much more expensive. I am sure she is working just as hard as we are.

Looking for the cheapest way to do things often does not mean that it would yield the desired result.

If there ever was a comment deserving of the "ok boomer 🙄" reaction this is definitely it.

You're funny.

And so very wrong.

Well said @babyjellyfish

"..the active discouragement of having children in your 20's , probably robs a lot of women of a focus,"

I nearly spat my tea out over that

I completely agree with this.

I read this thread last night open-mouthed in horror at all the posts agreeing with the OP.

As @babyjellyfish points out - there is another crucial point to uni and slow start to adult life, which is...fun! Go to uni and study a non-vocational course just because it interests you. Go to too many parties, meet people from all over the world - DC both have friendship groups that are largely international. Travel. Be free to drop everything and go abroad or have an exciting but unsuitable romance. Ten years of this really is good for you. I remember when I was knee deep in nappies and sleepless nights thinking, Thank God I lived before this. I had a store of fun and adventures, so I didn't regret the monotony of child rearing. But if I hadn't travelled in WEurope, Africa and Middle East, lived abroad, had a brilliant but penniless vocational career and kissed some very rakish frogs, I'd not have been genuinely and deeply happy with my kind and sensible DH and domestic life.

Adulthood is very important - getting off your parents' sofa and out into the world is essential in your twenties. But there are many different ways to do it. And we are adults for a long time these days. So wasting some of your twenties in pursuit of fun and adventure seems like a good life plan to me. I am nudging DC to do it.

The other thing is that at the age of 36, I only know four happily married couples I know who have been with their current spouse since before the age of 24 ish, but they didn't marry or have children until their late 20s or early 30s.

I know three women I know who were married by the age of 25, and all three of them are now divorced from the father of their older children.

The vast majority of my friends did not get together with their current partners until they were at least in their late 20s and very few were married before they turned 30. And in many cases, when I think back to who they were with in their late teens and early 20s, all I can say is thank God they didn't marry that person.

I kissed a lot of frogs before I got together with my husband, and even though none of them were that bad, I'm very glad I didn't marry or have children with any of them. The guy my best friend spent her early 20s with was an emotional abuser who isolated her from her friends and family and destroyed her self confidence. She left him after he threw something at her head.

It's all very well saying that people would be better off settling down in our early 20s, but a lot of us just aren't mature enough to make good choices at that age, and a lot of us would be divorced now if we had followed that advice. As a lot of the Boomer generation who got married in their early 20s in fact are.

^yeah, I don’t agree that having fun in your twenties and not being tied down with traditional responsibilities is somehow a bad thing either, tbh. I loved my twenties, and wouldn’t change the experiences I had for the world, I absolutely developed as a person in that time. An adulthood that isn’t defined by marriage and children is still an adulthood.

I turned down two proposals in my early twenties, but if I’d have married either of them in my it would have been a disaster, frankly. When I did get married (to someone who had also spent their twenties in much the same way I had) I was ready to, and I’ve never felt I missed out on anything.

Hi OP @rudolphrainbownose can I ask you for a 4th time: “What do you think 10+ years of austerity has done this country?”

Or are you just going to sugar-coat it with “you should just have a child and a good marriage and you’ll have a purpose in life” 🙄