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Comment by specialp | Hacker News Reader

It might be because people are getting married and having children later. I find that most people that I know that had parents that got divorced, it happened when their kids were in their mid to late teens. People now getting married at older ages and having kids later might get divorced now outside the 45 year old window.

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Or you could take a more cynical view:

Women that marry in their late 20s and have kids in their 30s aren't really thrilled with their dating prospects when they're fast approaching 40 and have a kid.

Men that marry in their late 20s and have kids in their 30s don't like the idea of living in a crappy apartment, driving a 15yo Civic and eating rice and beans well into their 50s because they're getting bent over for child support.

If you get married and feel you've made the wrong choice later in life you have more motivation to "make it work" because your ability to "do better" is worse.

50yr ago it wasn't uncommon for people to get married in their early 20s and be divorced (with or without kids, usually with) by 30. Millennials may just have skipped that phase.

Edit: Never mind that last paragraph, it is contradicted by one of the graphs.

The graph on the page directly disagrees with that last sentence. 18-34 age range was bouncing around 11-13 percent divorce rate. Not much has changed at all in that age range.

Or a more positive view: more mature people are better able to identify partnerships that can endure. Or people who are older are more fixed and less likely to grow away from their partners. Or more time affords more opportunity to de-risk potential partners so social sorting has more time to “work”. Etc etc etc. “just so”

> Women that marry in their late 20s and have kids in their 30s don't really have great dating prospects when they're fast approaching 40 and have a kid.

Is there any need to gender that statement? It seems just as true of men as of women. With the possible exception of differing child-support rates in the sexes (for which I have not bothered to gather any data), probably even the same is true of:

> Men that marry in their late 20s and have kids in their 30s don't like the idea of living in a crappy apartment, driving a 15yo Civic and eating rice and beans well into their 50s because they're getting bent over for child support.

Child support payments are not the cause of women's financial woes after divorce, but you can absolutely look at the same general sentence: "Women that marry in their late 20s and have kids in their 30s don't like the idea of living in a crappy apartment, driving a 15yo Civic and eating rice and beans well into their 50s because they're getting bent over for" being women who had kids, often put their careers on the back burner, often were not aware of financial decision-making within the marriage, & got divorced without the ability to make as much money.

Yeah, it's complicated; you can see one paper here [1] that quantifies the post-divorce earnings gap. It is improving. Anyhow, divorce is a ludicrously bad economic decision for many women. Don't know if that's a factor in the changing rate.

[1] https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/files/iser_working_papers/2008-... A more recent book: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/7519.html There's a chapter on divorce & child support. Gets pretty mathy. An interesting survey from UBS (the numbers are buried) about female abdication of financial decision-making responsibility in marriages: https://www.ubs.com/content/dam/WealthManagementAmericas/doc...

> often put their careers on the back burner, often were not aware of financial decision-making within the marriage, & got divorced without the ability to make as much money.

It's interesting how some paint this picture of mothers who decided to be homemakers as women who are just too dumb to care the correct amount about climbing the career lader.

I think that's really unkind. It's not dumb. It is an economic decision in an economic system that does not reward caretakers.

A fault confessed is half redressed. After all, what you call "really unkind" isn't my opinion, it's yours.

What did I say that was unkind?

Maybe you're mad about the term "abdication of decision-making". It's a term of art. What's unkind about it?

Maybe you think it's unkind to say a woman is putting career on the back burner. But that's often accurate and a very conscious decision.

I think you don't like looking at the results of these decisions. That doesn't make the decisions themselves bad, or the people making them stupid, and describing those decisions accurately is not unkind. You are mad at the wrong people.

When I'm talking about these things I'm looking at my own bank account, as a woman who is hanging back in career so she can stay home with her kid a bit. It's just patronizing to pretend somehow magically I'm going to make more money because of this, or that when I'm 40+ I'll magically be able to jump into another tech job at an even higher pay grade. Like all the people we're talking about, I'm making decisions in an economic system that is not going to economically reward me for caretaking. I'm doing it anyway, trying to balance the present time with children with the necessity of supporting myself financially for another 50+ years given my family's longevity. I stand by everything I said.

Apparently raising a good, quality child/person isn't a respectable ambition and should instead be avoided in pursuit of the rat race know as a career... gotta love this mass damnation of mother/fatherhood!

> Is there any need to gender that statement? It seems just as true of men as of women.

There is quite a stark contrast between the sexes on desirability at various ages:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/style/dating-apps-online-...

Men typically don't take custody (IIRC, they often don't even ask). So he assumed the children would stay with the woman, and be a drag on her dating life, while the man would pay child support. It doesn't have to be this way, but it usually is.

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