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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

but then it's not the age that made the difference, but the focus in your life. you had other interests, and that also told you that it's not the right time for you to have children. not everyone has the same focus at 23. i wasn't interested in getting married at 23 either. but other people are. did your wife's parents want to have children that early, or was that unplanned? you don't need to answer, but i think that question makes a difference. i don't believe people chose to have children if they don't feel ready for it.

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In my mind age and this shift in focus are at least somewhat linked. 23 year old me would be pissed at 30 year old me for not moving to a FAANG company and instead focus on marriage, those 7 years did teach me a lot of important things about myself and the world.

My Wife comes from a country where getting married and having kids before the age of 20 was very much the norm at the time, which led to a lot of people having children at a time where they were not ready for that responsibility.

would you mind sharing the country/culture? as i said elsewhere, in china people also marry and have children young, and they are ready. but they also have a lot of support from their parents and society. young couples normally live with their parents who help them raise the children and run the household, allowing the young couple to learn but also focus on work and career.

This would be Romania, specifically shortly before and during the fall of communism, there were all kinds of weird incentives in place to encourage the birth rate, for example military engineers (like my FIL) where able to get out of deployment to rural infrastructure projects if they had a (pregnant) wife or a newborn. So a good chunk of his unit had children in a span of give or take 4 months, which coincidentally was about a year after an upcoming deployment to build a dam in a godforsaken area of the country was announced.

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