Inspired by Republican VP nominee Sarah Palin's 17-year-old daughter Bristol's pregnancy and engagement, last Wednesday the The New York Times ran an article, "Now, the Bad News on Teenage Marriage," by Sarah Kershaw (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/fashion/04marriage.html?_r=1&oref=slogin). She notes that "the most comprehensive study on marriage and age that sociologists cite was published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2001, from 1995 data, and it found that 48 percent of those who marry before 18 are likely to divorce within 10 years, compared with 24 percent of those who marry after age 25."
Which means 52% of those who marry before 18 ARE still married 10 years later. Surprising. That's actually higher than I would've predicted.
Kershaw also points out that "teenagers two or three generations ago expected to take on more responsibility at a younger age...18-year-olds in working-class and immigrant families in particular already shoulder a lot of adult responsibilities, including fighting the war in Iraq, supporting their families and raising children." That is a good point. It wasn't so long ago, in the grand scheme of things, that people in our society were considered adults by the time they got to be teenagers. As Kershaw writes, although today the median age for marriage in the U.S. is 25.5 years old for women and 27.5 years old for men, in the 1950s the median age for women to get married was 19. (Guess that's why my mom joked about being "old" for getting married in 1966 at the age of 25.)
Of course, people died younger back then, so they didn't have to stay married quite as long. ;O
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