60% Of Americans Think You Should Have Kids Before This Age, According To Research
But remember: there is no ideal age to start a family.
TinaFields | mihailomilovanovic | Getty Images / Emma Rahmani | corelens Ah, America. The land of the free, the home of the brave — and the country where women are supposed to start popping out babies before the age of 25, apparently.
According to a 2013 Gallup poll, most Americans — to the tune of 58 percent — think the "ideal age" for women to begin having children is "25 or younger." Scarily, there is no bottom cap for that range, which in theory means 58 percent of our great country may or may not support teen pregnancy.
Of course, those same expectations don't apply to men. Only 42 percent of Americans responded that they believe the ideal age for males to start procreating is 25 or younger. Most people, 52 percent in fact, think the ideal age for men to start having babies is 26 or older.
There were some differences when it came to education levels. According to the poll, reasons for delayed parenthood increase dramatically with education, with some of the sharpest differences in views toward women's ideal age for becoming a mother. Americans who have higher levels of education were more likely than those with little to no college at all to believe women should wait until age 26 or older to have children.
It turns out adults aged 65 and older are the most likely to say women should start having children before they are 25, 72% of them to be exact. A solid majority of adults aged 18 to 29 and 50 to 64 also say this. Those least likely to believe women should start that young are those aged 30 to 49, at 49%.
Meanwhile, there’s this little thing called science, which recently debunked the theory that the risk of pregnancy complications increases with each year on the mother’s age. A 2012 study found that pregnancy in women above the age of 50 carried an equal amount of risk as in women in their 20s who got pregnant using donated eggs.
So, what gives?
These age-old beliefs of women ideally becoming pregnant and giving birth before the age of 25 have nothing to do with science or facts, but rather with cultural indoctrination; our country is still getting over a large chunk of history during which it wasn’t even considered appropriate for women to have jobs outside the home.
Let’s not forget that women got the right to vote a little over 100 years ago (that law passed in 1920, folks) — so it’s not all too surprising that a great many people still hold beliefs about “a woman’s place” that may or may not be archaic.
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