The two most important factors in having successful children are: 1. having two parents and 2. having older parents at child birth.
There’s a ton of data on this. Maybe it’s correlation only, but it also makes sense. Parenting is too difficult for a single person. And waiting until you’re established and stable will give your kids a better environment for growth.
I don’t actually wish I had my son earlier. I’m happy with our current situation. I’m able to give him access to a plethora of resources and attention so he can flourish. He’s turning 4 this year. I wish I could make more of him because I think this world is better with him in it, than not.
No, I said “early if possible” only because we cannot change the realities of biology. My wife is the same age as me, and we can likely have 1 more before she’s “done.” If we could have 3 or 4 with ease, we would.
An alternative solution would be for men to marry young. It’s a reasonable solution. But my wife’s age and maturity is a huge benefit too. She wasn’t ready to be a mom at 25 or 30.
It’s a difficult dilemma and balancing act.
Wealthy 50-years-olds having their firstborns, then promptly leaving them vast inheritance — boom! you get “successful” children merely because they got quite a boost. Meanwhile, you don't see not-so-wealthy 50-years-olds having new kids because they had them already at 25 and that was enough.
Also, there is a whole host of implications from having kids earlier. Like, you being just 30 when they go to school — or young adults having 65-year-old parents to care of when they'd be rather establishing their own life.
Look at our prison population and you’ll find people raised by a very young single parent.
Look at people that graduate from university and you’ll see the opposite.
It strongly correlates with just about any measure you can think of. And it is true across race, gender, immigration status, etc.
The issue is that differentiated careers - ones where you are hard to replace, your company will pay you more than commodity wages, and they'll give you time off for a sick kid because replacing you will cost more than just letting you take a day off when necessary - require a long period of time to become differentiated and hard to replace. That could be spending your 20s in med school and residency, or in law school and being an associate, or bouncing between lower-level engineering jobs before you get the experience needed to tackle big projects. But in most fields, it does take up most of your 20s, which means you really only get stability, trust, and the ability to downshift for family life in your 30s.
Ideally, on a societal level, you should be able to raise a family on one of those "commodity" wages. But that's not happening, largely because many of the necessities of life - housing, health care, and education - have become differentiated professions where owners and practitioners can get premium wages. We need to allow shantytowns and village doctors again before we can have large amounts of people having kids in their 20s.
This ignores the genetic confounding.
The reason "older parents" have "successful kids" is because those same parents have genes which make their kids successful. Decades of twin studies have shown that parenting really doesn't matter, but parents do (because of the genes they impart).
Today things are so messed up, the economy, the push in secular cultures to even destroy the nuclear family, all this is taking a toll on society. Eventually it might be too late to recover.
Sounds like a straw man fallacy. My faith both advocates for abstinence before marriage, and getting marriage as soon as it viable (physically, mentally, financially, etc.).