from BYU:
A national study found that college students think 25 years old is the “right age” to get married, while a majority of parents feel 25 is still a little too soon. So it’s no coincidence that when Justin Bieber said he’d like to wed by 25, Oprah Winfrey urged him to wait longer.“The assumption has been that the younger generation wants to delay marriage and parents are hassling them about when they would get married,” said Brian Willoughby, a professor at Brigham Young University and lead author of the study. “We actually found the opposite, that the parental generation is showing the ‘slow down’ mindset more than the young adults.”Willoughby and his co-authors in BYU’s School of Family Life gathered info from 536 college students and their parents from five college campuses around the country (BYU was not in the sample). As they report in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships,the scholars found the hesitation is consistent across gender.“Initially we thought that this might be dads wanting their daughters to delay marriage,” Willoughby said. “Moms and dads trended together – gender wasn’t a factor.”One of the driving forces behind parents’ restraint is the feeling that their children should get an education first. While they generally feel marriage is important, parents think the “right age” is one year older than what their children say. Excluding teen marriages, research doesn’t support the notion that there is an optimal time to tie the knot.
November 28th, 2012 | 10:25 pm
Let us hope that they not only hope and dream but actually marry.
November 28th, 2012 | 11:51 pm
What was the average age of marriage 20 years ago? If it was 25-26 or less, which I tend to believe it was, there’s some regret, frustration, or self-hatred going on here among parents, or so it would seem.
What I wonder is what kind of emotional life these people are envisioning for their kids until their late 20′s. It seems the only way to follow this advice effectively is either to delay marriage for some arbitrary number of years after you’ve already found the apparently compatible person you’re going to wind up with anyway, or to cruise along in a sea of noncommitment (read: disposable relationships with disposable feelings) for over half a decade until you hit the “right” age to start seeking a permanent mate. Neither strikes me as really good parental counsel — but I think that the people holding this view would not actually counsel either of these things; they’re just not thinking things through.
November 29th, 2012 | 12:52 am
This accurately describes my experience growing up Mormon in CA and Utah in the late 90′s. Based on things I heard my mother and other women said, I think these parents are reacting to earlier LDS cultural pressure to marry, and/or have absorbed the cultural expectation that young adults shouldn’t marry until they’ve attained an (ever-growing) list of personal milestones. More than a few people from that generation expressed concern about what non-LDS must think of Mormons, marrying too young and having too many kids.
Full disclosure: I married at 19 and am now expecting child #8, so I suppose I’ve made myself a lightning rod for this kind of disapproval, and possibly have heard more of it than many other people my age.
These same parents and older adults within the LDS community-at least in my experience–are usually the same ones that heavily encourage use of birth control and the delaying of parenthood after marriage. Of course, birth control isn’t officially discouraged in my church.
Thanks for the links to the other articles; I enjoyed them greatly.
November 29th, 2012 | 12:46 pm
As I guy who was eager to get married from the get-go but surprisingly finds himself single at 36, I wonder whether measuring the *desire* to get married by a certain age says as much as we think it does. So many factors–both internal and external–play into the whether and when of marriage. The want to matters, but it may be that many more internal and external factors conspire to make the marrying age considerably older than 25 in the years ahead.
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