Why does barely anyone my age have kids?

[Quietterry]

I’m 25 and had my first young so she’s 9 now and yes I was very young having her but I’m no longer a spring chicken and looking at my cohort who went to school with me out of 200+ people I can count on one hand who’s had kids.

Im not judging them for it I’m just curious on what changed when my mother was my age practically everyone she knew had kids by 25!

I know there’s different theories on this and they probably all have some merit but I’m leaning towards thinking it’s phones. I heard recently some people spend 8 hours a day on their phones.

Have you seen the state of the planet and the too-many humans on it? Why would you ever want to subject another person to it and to other people

I didn't think about having kids until I have a good salary and have my own home and sure that I would able to provide. I had mine three in my 30s! I definitely not financially ready in my early and mid 20s unfortunately.

25 when we had our first & now relatively young grandparents. We love having the same energy for them as we did with our own & often get mistaken for their parents. We did all our freedom loving travel when still at uni as did our children who married straight after then had their first child two years later. It's a choice but none of us would change a thing.

You seem to be projecting. I have absolutely no judgement for people having babies in their 20s. I had a specific path, and some of that was affected by chance. If I'd met the right person in my 20s, some of it might have been different but I will never know.

My comment was in response to the one of yours which since got deleted that the women who delayed childbirth are all jealous old hags.

You did the right thing for you, I did the right thing for me. And I assume for both of us it was a conscious planned choice. Unlike the OP, who will never know if she would also have been 25 and childless but for a twist of fate, rather than an obession with smart phone use.

I am 43 and had mine at 33 and 35 (as others have said, I wanted marriage, a stable career and house first - plus a bit of freedom!).

However I was still just younger than my own mum, who had us when she was 34 and 36.

She was probably one of the oldest at the school gates, but there were others of comparable age and actually, I don't think there were that many who became mothers before 25. Probably mid-late 20s was most common. And this was the 80s! I think you would need to go back to the 60s/70s before the average age was early 20s.

I am in your parent's generation - I have two kids now at uni. I had them at 36 and 38, and I was not that unusual, so this is a trend that has been going on for a while. My mum had her kids at 19, 21, and 32 and was seen as unusually old to have her third . . . so I think things shifted between her generation and mine. This was when women started going to university and out to work in much larger numbers. I think that trend might be starting to reverse, so some younger women are opting for families rather than careers. But obviously, it is still your experience that you are unusual. Good luck with your choice, I will you well.

Because it's 2026, not 1956.
Because at 25, people ARE spring chickens and want to have fun have sex get hammered get high travel around the world try silly haircuts and get a nipple piercing go and work in China for a year etc...

Anything but being on MN and saying stuff such as "I'm 25 I'm no spring chicken".

I had my kids in my early twenties in the late nineties. I was the first but most of my friends had at least one by 25 and at playgroup most mums were 25-32.

@worldshottestmom

Also most of the posts talking about doing other things than having kids in their 20s are trying to explain to the OP that there were other things than smart phone use keeping them from having kids. Not saying their choices were better.

I had way better things to do in my twenties, such as building a career, travelling, having fun.

Edit to add: I feel like I need to add here that this is what worked for ME, I have no concern for what others feel is right for them.

I don't disagree with your theory that young people today are having babies when they are older. When I was 25 in the early 90s, I had my first child. That wasn't unusual.

I think that it may be partly due to technology - the world is much more accessible now, many more young people travel the world, take gap years and choose to live abroad. This just didn't happen in the 80s, not to the extent that it does now. We didn't have the money to travel for a start off and we had no access to all of the different destinations that are so popular now - and we can thank social media for that. Also many people didn't go to university unless they were super clever! Most people my age in the 80s left school to work in the town they were born and grew up in and worked in offices or factories or whatever the city they lived in specialised in - steel, biscuits, socks etc! I'm not saying it was a bad thing at all but yes, things are now very different.

Thankfully, there is more choice, the world is smaller - in terms of being accessible, and young people now have many more realistic choices than we had in the 80s.

Settling down and having families is happening later due to people making the most of this choice before they settle down. I don't suppose the COL and house prices help either!

OP, you will do well to know this site is mostly middle aged women with rich husbands who pretend that they are above everyone else in their own little imaginations. If their husbands aren't rich, they will make sure to tell you how many degrees they have and how important they are in their job, and how much better than you they are.

This comment is particularly hilarious. Attacking the OP for words that you have put in her mouth. Her OP states she has observed noone she knows her age has kids, and that she isn't judging them but just curious as to why. Alas, you have twisted that into she thinks it's weird that not everyone else is making the same life choices as her. As you are sat there, judging her for not making the same life choices as you. Sigh.

"Also I bet your child wasn't planned" - sorry, what does that have to do with it? Are you just trying to be as bitchy as possible or is that your full-time personality?

"And if you were to have a child, you wouldn't be having them until your late 20s" - and why is that? I thought it was weird to assume that everyone wanted to live the same life on the same trajectory?

If only we were all as perfect as you

It’s rather amusing that you sit there and say “the cost of living and housing is not ideal but..” when you had a kid at 16 so obviously you weren’t financially supporting or housing yourself. You were either subsidised by your parent(s) or the government, or both. These adult women your age have most likely made the decision to not have a child yet because they don’t have their mum to fall back on, or they have better things to be doing.

”I’m 25 and no longer a spring chicken” reflects rather pitiful on yourself. I could never imagine having such a defeatist attitude out of life at that age. By the time I was 25 I was a graduate and I had just moved to another country for the third time. I’d would rather have eaten my own arm than get pregnant.

@Quietterry

I don’t think it’s phones (at least not as a major factor) as this change towards having first children older began to happen before phones were playing a major role in people’s lives. It’s been shifting for decades and decades. 25 has been a considerable way below the average age for some time.

In my view (only an opinion but based partly on data I’ve read about at various times) this was initially a ‘positive’ social trend, i.e. the product of access to contraception, women having greater access to further and higher education and essentially people choosing to put off having children until later to start careers etc. So my mum, for example, had children later than my Granny because she went to university and had the choice to wait a while (the nuance to that is that my Granny was wartime generation so did delay a bit because of the war, but still had kids earlier than my mum). My mum has a number of siblings and they all had kids later than their parents, bar one who had an unplanned pregnancy.

Of the next generation (myself, multiple female cousins and a couple of male cousins) most had children a bit later again than our parents did - almost all between 35 and 40. For most of us this was choice, and to an extent a product of privilege, e.g. pursuing various qualifications, travelling, perhaps even career changing (though myself and OH were also delayed by fertility treatment).

Now though, I think there’s the added complexity of a ‘negative’ social trend in that more and more people who want to start trying for children can’t, even at a relatively late age, because of financial pressures, so they may delay even more than previous generations.

Yes they are saying that, let's not beat around the bush. This whole thread is just older women hating on a young mum who had her child at 16. It's embarrassing.

I’m more talking about people who have their first at 37+. If their own parents were 37, that’s a first time grandparent at 74. The generations are getting smaller and more spaced out.

What an odd thing to say - are you OK?

I had my kids at 35 and 39…. most of my friends had kids in their 30s. Our 20s were spent studying, travelling and partying, then getting ourselves set up with houses and careers etc before having our kids.

My parents were 33 and 35 when I was born in 1980 and I’m the youngest - they were definitely considered quite old compared to my friends parents.

Not everyone wants to waste their 20s destroying their health and making embarrassing choices anymore. There's a much bigger focus on health and living with a purpose. This generation isn’t growing up in the 90s/00s, that time has passed, a while ago now.

Yes and I hate to be a voice of doom but after a certain age parents may / often need some care not always hands on but at least organizing things . I can’t imagine managing children and care for parents at the same time.

It's called sarcasm. I'm okay other than grown women berating a young mum for having a child at 16.

Haha, it’s definitely not mobile phones stopping people!! I wanted to see the world first, get a career, live a bit before dedicating my life to small people (our lovely little dictators). I still felt like a kid at 25!

It’s a class thing too. From my middle class circle of acquaintances, almost nobody has parents who had them before 25. So even in the 80s, while working class women often had children very young, the same wasn’t always true for the middle classes, many of whom went to university.

I don’t think they’re hating on her but the sneering, overly defensive comments from older mums on here are awful. The gist is they’re allowed to reel off a list of their amazing accomplishments and say how terrible it wouldn’t been to have kids at 25 because they had much better things to do, but if you then point out the cons of older parenthood you’re a judgy fucker just jealous of their glittering career and international supertravels.