In part I think it’s because young people’s worlds have massively expanded, on average. I traveled to 5 continents mostly without parents as a teenager, and I’m a pretty average guy who just put his mind to it. It’d be unthinkable for my parents to have done the same.
In part I think we also have more time, life expectancy grew by about 7 years in the past 50 years. And our ability to have kids at a later age is growing with medical advances. Going to school for longer and getting kids later, makes sense in that context.
Anyway I think it’s a bit misleading to take particular ages and then compare percentages (e.g. 21yos with a kid in 1980 vs 2021) This way of presenting data can exaggerate the differences, average age of first kid would be better for example. I don’t know how to call this statistics phenomenon, but imagine the light blue area to be ‘kids in the house at 21yo’ and then imagine a minor shift in the average age of having the first kid, the resulting figure would seem much more pronounced than the minor shift in average age. Would’ve been nice to see the data presented differently.
In part I think we also have more time, life expectancy grew by about 7 years in the past 50 years. And our ability to have kids at a later age is growing with medical advances. Going to school for longer and getting kids later, makes sense in that context.
Anyway I think it’s a bit misleading to take particular ages and then compare percentages (e.g. 21yos with a kid in 1980 vs 2021) This way of presenting data can exaggerate the differences, average age of first kid would be better for example. I don’t know how to call this statistics phenomenon, but imagine the light blue area to be ‘kids in the house at 21yo’ and then imagine a minor shift in the average age of having the first kid, the resulting figure would seem much more pronounced than the minor shift in average age. Would’ve been nice to see the data presented differently.