Entire generations of women have been told that it is ok to delay having children into late 30s and early 40s.
The science clearly shows that both fertility rate and increase of an unhealthy baby increase with age.
There should be 'embarassing campaigns' to revert this.
Are you really going to run the "we need more eighteen year olds to be welfare mothers" campaign?
But ideally a woman should be having a first child before 30 so a second and possibly 3rd in early 30s.
A large percentage of marriages end in divorce. Stability is statistically an illusion.
Why "obviously"? If they're not old enough to start families, why is the age of consent that low in many places?
(When I was 16 and living in the UK, it was 16, but back then so too was the age of the end of mandatory schooling).
At 18 most people will have just come out of a regimented education system, never had to pay bills etc
Working with the grain on this rather than against it, it wouldn't matter that new parents were kinda noobs at adult life, so long as they were actually adults.
The problem is that human being used to live in family clans, and the western state institutions deliberately pushed the nuclear family as family clans were powerful.
And then as cities became popular for jobs, kids moved away from family.
And presently the parents buy a house and raise kids, but with ever increasing house prices and gentrification many can't afford to then live down the street from their parents.
Life sucks in the best of times. I was not going to bring a human to the world so she would suffer, replacement levels be damned.
If I was unable to give my daughter a comfortable life, I would rather have no child.
I think many people would agree with this sentiment. If we want more people to have children in early adulthood, we need a major social upheaval so that people can achieve financial stability earlier in life.
Most people that seem overly concerned with fertility and population replacement, also happen to consistently vote against any policy that could nudge things in a direction where people would be able to achieve financial stability earlier in life.
My answer to that is a vague shrug.
Kids don't care about a comfortable life, as long as they are loved and supported.
I've worked with Devs in the west who came from tiny rural villages in India, and with love and support got into the leading universities in India and did well.
Lots of middle class western kids get screwed up, despite 'having everything'.
Money, a bedroom not shared with a sibling and so on do not matter to a child.
It's a lot more difficult to give love and support when you can get evicted for not paying rent.