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This is counsel I have heard from a lot of different leaders and members over time — don’t delay having children. Get married and start building your family immediately. Personally, I don’t see many blessings other than the vigor that comes from being young and active, to play and run and jump with your children. But I wondered what others thought. I think it totally depends on the couple. Period. Having said that, there are benefits of starting relatively young (after mission-age). Energy is one, but it’s hard to start late if you want more than three kids without the wife having to be pregnant and/or nursing continually for years.
We have six, the oldest of whom was born when I was 23 and my wife was 21.5 – which worked for us. Our youngest is now 9 – which means she will graduate from high school when I am almost 55 and my wife is 53.5. I really like the thought of having 10 years of work time for both of us before I have to start thinking of retirement or missions or anything else. I also like that we were able to have 6 kids born before the classic age when pregnancy gets exponentially trickier and more dangerous. (about 36-ish)
The divorce rate decreases significantly for men and women at roughly 21.5-23 and 20-21.5, respectively. So, from a purely statistical standpoint, there’s no reason to delay marriage past those ages if you’re worried about divorce.
I’m not saying I think everyone should get married “young” (certainly not before age 20, speaking generally), but there are a lot of advantages of marrying younger than the social average and starting to have kids earlier than the social average for those who are at least college graduates. The keys, imo, are dating someone long enough to know them quite well, planning your family carefully and intentionally and finishing college (at the very least).
If Planned Parenthood wouldn’t object to a poster family with six kids, my family could be that poster family.
I wrote the following this past April about this basic topic, with a note at the end emphasizing it is up to the individual couples:
“
Why Should We Marry Younger than the Modern, Industrial World’s Average?” ( http://thingsofmysoul.blogspot.com/2011/04/why-should-we-marry-younger-than-worlds.html I agree with much of what Ray mentioned. I’d just add that the “Honeymoon” phase after getting married is quite a transition for most couples.
I think waiting at least a year after the wedding to even get pregnant is ideal.
In some ways (physical), it’s better for women to have children young. Young women I have known who’ve given birth, often have far less trouble than older ones, bounce back more quickly and are less likely to have autistic/Downs’ etc children. The flipside of that, of course, is that the women lose a large chunk of their life.
Have two kids between 25 and 30. Most optimal for long term happiness, and prosperity. Great advice, Cadence – for those for whom it works and is what they want. 
Cadence wrote:Have two kids between 25 and 30. Most optimal for long term happiness, and prosperity.
Old-Timer wrote:Great advice, Cadence – for those for whom it works and is what they want.
Oooooohhhhh, now I get it. I had thought Cadence was suggesting that my wife give birth to two children that spring from the womb fully grown, each to be aged 25-30 years. Now that really would be “optimal for long term happiness and prosperity.”
😆 :thumbup: Roy wrote:Cadence wrote:Have two kids between 25 and 30. Most optimal for long term happiness, and prosperity.
Old-Timer wrote:Great advice, Cadence – for those for whom it works and is what they want.
Oooooohhhhh, now I get it. I had thought Cadence was suggesting that my wife give birth to two children that spring from the womb fully grown, each to be aged 25-30 years. Now that really would be “optimal for long term happiness and prosperity.”
😆 :thumbup:
😆 Some days, it kills me that my kids are growing up so fast… but some days, I realize it’d kill me a lot sooner if they didn’t!
:crazy: I read a report somewhere that if a man has kids while married in the temple, the chance of him remaining active for his life go up substantially. If Church leaders were acting out of naked self-interest (which they probably aren’t) I can see why they would recommend early child-rearing. For me and my wife, I think it was right to have kids late. We got a lot of flack about it, and we didn’t have the heart to tell people that our marriage was struggling due to my wife’s inability to consummate the marriage, and that I wasn’t willing to rush into childbearing (through artificial means), with that problem unresolved. We actually joked with each other to ease the pain when people got judgmental on us and started pressing for why we hadn’t had children. We would suggest saying “We can explain this, but it means we have to talk about [x — refer to male anatomy here] and [refer to y – female anatomy here]. Do you want to talk about x and y in detail?”
Another reason our marriage has survived is that we’ve never had to deal with the stresses of money. Sure, things haven’t always gone the way we would have liked, but we’ve never had to worry about where the next dollar will come from wikth both of us working for several years before children came along. In fact, there was room for those extras that made life more enjoyable etcetera. When you factor in the fact that my wife was barely out of the teenage years when we married, and had considerable growing up to do (which I only discovered after our 6 month engagement when we got to live with each other), I’m glad we waited a while to have children.
Had I bowed to the pressure to produce babies immediately through artificial means, I’m not sure we would have survived. Only in recent years has my wife learned to share in the household duties, and I would have been thoroughly disillusioned with my marriage if we had to mix all the challenges we faced with the financial and emotional stresses of having children.
I hope people remember the plight of people like myself when they start judging others for having children later in life. You never know what the family dynamic is, how their marriage is, or even their biological challenges. So to paint everyone with the same brush can be dead wrong.
I have also found that some women have this stamina to run a household with a lot of children. Some are darn good at it. That doesn’t exist in my family, so keeping our family small has been a wise decision that I personally feel totally good about, as I’m sure others do in the Church as well.
That whole message and line of thinking from the Church failed us, personally. It was the single biggest factor in my wife leaving the Church and in my eventual faith mutation. We started a big family immediately, with no education or job skills. Faith was supposed to be enough to help make everything work. God wouldn’t leave us hanging right? right? We wanted to play our part and provide a righteous home where more spirits could learn about the Gospel. I know. I know. You might think we were stupid for believing that, but I swear that was the worldview I was raised with. I almost feel embarassed about it at times. It worked for my parents. It’s supposed to work for me too, right?
I do OK now, after 21 years of scrambling and hustling, with a broken body from military service. It toook me 11 years to get a Bachelor’s Degree going to school when I could while working full time and taking care of a family.
Our kids are getting much different advice than we got growing up…
You have to have children early on to help work the farm. Or at least I think that’s a portion of the logic at play. I do think that SD gets it right, too, that having children increases one’s investment in the church immediately and many are then involved through their kids for the next 20 years. I don’t think it’s cynical to see that as a motivating factor behind the advice. After all, if you feel that will contribute to someone’s eternal salvation, then you would advise it. On the downside, though, I am concerned that too many get bad advice about how to select a suitable partner. Not all TR holding RMs are equally good matches for all wives. And encouraging people to marry early before they even understand their own character, let alone someone else’s, is pre-1960s thinking.
The sooner I can get them off to college and on their own, the sooner I can start spending their inheritance. I’m glad I’ll still be young enough to be active when the house is empty! 
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