Novelist Hilary mantel claims girls are ready to give birth at the age of just 14.

Rubbish. Speaking as a teen, the majority of "us" aren't even capable of acting responsible ourselves, never mind having to raise a child too. The selfish gene seems to be active in a lot of teenagers, so I can't imagine how they'd be able to cope with having to put someone else before themselves.

There will be teenagers out there who could/have coped well with it, but the majority? No way.

Oh, and where are they going to get the money to provide for them and the little one when they're still required to be in education?

I imagine she meant biologically, in which case, that's also what men are about. I've heard definitions of society that say cultures only exist to raise children safely.

I think I was supposed to be outraged. oops.

Although I don't think that having sex and having babies is what young women are about, I think it's fairly apparent that delaying adulthood into the 20's is a very recent social phenomenon. I think it applies to both genders, and I don't think it's advantageous to either the individuals or society.

If we were still living on the tundra, sure that would make a lot of sense. But these days you need to spend that time getting an education. Times have changed.

Don and I are in essential agreement here (gasp!). The luxury of idle teenage years is pretty much an invention of the 20th Century, after WWII even. Before that, most families were not in circumstances to afford such frivolity. Farmers needed their fledgling adults to do a hell of a lot of work; city dwellers often needed extra income that could be provided by teens, and even younger children. I'm not about to say that situation was better, just historically true. And people tended to marry at much younger ages, especially in the 19th Century and earlier.

caw

I agree with Don and Blacbird
If you look at most of history then 14/15 y.o.s were married off and pregnant in most societies because there were few other alternatives for them. That is, biologically, when females are at their most fertile and resilient to cope with pregnancy. Most of them did so in the context of extended family supporting them.

waylander said:

I agree with Don and Blacbird
If you look at most of history then 14/15 y.o.s were married off and pregnant in most societies because there were few other alternatives for them. That is, biologically, when females are at their most fertile and resilient to cope with pregnancy. Most of them did so in the context of extended family supporting them.

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Yep and yep. Teenage irresponsibility is a recent allowed trend. Teenagers are perfectly capable of growing up a whole heck of a lot faster than they are now and family structure and demands were a lot different too. That said the mind boggles at the thought of all of our current teenagers suddenly having kids in their current state. They need to become adults before they start having babies, age is therefore irrelevant as there are plenty of big babies in their 40's and 50's who still shouldn't be raising kids.

cuddlekins said:

How many families do you think help their teen daughters raise kids? .

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Raises hand and starts waving.
Oh-Oh, pick me! pick me!

Why yes we do. Not only my immediate family, of which I'm head honcho, but the whole community I belong to as well.

Its very common for an older sister to adopt the baby of a younger one, or a grandma, or auntie to do the same.

If one of our young women gets pregnant and is not in a position to raise the baby herself, then theres a whole line of relatives rushing to help.

For us, there's no shame in our young women ending up with unwanted, or unplanned pregnancy.

I'm an old fogey, and I was working dangerous farm equipment and hunting alone by the time I was 12. You talk about giving a 12-yr-old access to a tractor or a gun today, and CPS will be in your driveway faster than you can blink. Why is that? That's only been 4 decades.

Obviously a problem resulting from giving women the right to vote. If they had just let the men stay in charge, this situation might not exist.
But with the right to vote, women began to think they could become educated and have their own career!

As for idle teenagers - that's the fault of greedy corporations, video games, and skateboards.

I'm not for teenage irresponsibility, but I also think that letting teenagers grow up over a long period of time is better for society. Of course, I think that growing up over a long period of time involves lots and lots of educating, learning, and playing.

Gregg said:

As for idle teenagers - that's the fault of greedy corporations, video games, and skateboards.

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I know you're (probably) joking or being sarcastic, but video games are mostly played by 21-25 year olds.

Because...they have disposable income and a good rig or a good console are expensive.

cuddlekins said:

That's really good. But back here, that rarely seems to happen.

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Yeah I know. I'm thinking that it depends on how americanized people are.

The delayed adulthood is definitely cultural, but biologically, some girls can begin periods as early as 9, while they won't reach their full growth until 16-18. That says that reproduction and "adulthood" don't necessarily have a link.

I'm not condoning or encouraging kids to go get pregnant, because our society isn't set up that way anymore. In today's world, it is a fine balance of creating a stable home or career when young, and risking fertility or genetic issues that increase with age.

Our social roles require more skills than they once did. In hunter-gatherer families, kids are a important part of the workforce. In farming families it's the same. But in urban environments, kids are only trusted with simple, repetitive tasks like flipping burgers, stacking shelves and ferrying food. My company takes many of its recruits at age 21-23, usually with an advanced degree, but it takes a year or three of training, mentoring and experience before I feel that they're acting as responsible adults. My own cohort started reproducing at age 30something, but around half weren't ready to be parents, except physically.

I'm not entirely sure when youth ends and adulthood begins, but among my peers I suspect it was something like 36-38.

I love her writing, but she often says weird, ill-considered things in interviews. I don't know if she doesn't think before she speaks or if it's because of her chronic health issues (which I have a lot of sympathy with--some days my head is so under siege by angry viruses that I don't make any sense at all) or what.

Also, she says in her autobiography that when she is researching a book she pretty much inhabits the world of that book 24/7; since IIRC she is writing another book set in the same time period as Wolf Hall, she may still be in that era's mindset.

Don said:

I'm an old fogey, and I was working dangerous farm equipment and hunting alone by the time I was 12. You talk about giving a 12-yr-old access to a tractor or a gun today, and CPS will be in your driveway faster than you can blink. Why is that? That's only been 4 decades.

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Same with my father. By the time he was 13 he was out on the range on his own for a month or two at a time watching a thousand head of cattle and doing just fine. I guess it just shows that what you expect of a child they'll meet or even exceed those expectations most of the time. If you shelter them and baby them, they'll be babies, if you expect them to be fully capable, chances are they'll be fully capable.

sulong said:

Yeah I know. I'm thinking that it depends on how americanized people are.

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Whether people help their teenage daughters raise babies depends on how Americanized they are? I have no idea what "Americanized" even means. Care to explain?

The point of every species is propagating itself. This isn't news. Where the writer erred is in limiting her statement only to young females.

Don said:

Although I don't think that having sex and having babies is what young women are about, I think it's fairly apparent that delaying adulthood into the 20's is a very recent social phenomenon. I think it applies to both genders, and I don't think it's advantageous to either the individuals or society.

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I agree that it's recent. But I disagree about it not being advantageous. The delay of childbearing is certainly a good thing, but the delay of OTHER responsibilities is not so good.

veinglory said:

If we were still living on the tundra, sure that would make a lot of sense. But these days you need to spend that time getting an education. Times have changed.

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They have. But we kinda threw the baby out with the bathwater (no pun intended) when we not only restricted teens from marriage, but we also restricted them from jobs and real world repsonsibilities.

blacbird said:

Don and I are in essential agreement here (gasp!). The luxury of idle teenage years is pretty much an invention of the 20th Century, after WWII even. Before that, most families were not in circumstances to afford such frivolity. Farmers needed their fledgling adults to do a hell of a lot of work; city dwellers often needed extra income that could be provided by teens, and even younger children. I'm not about to say that situation was better, just historically true. And people tended to marry at much younger ages, especially in the 19th Century and earlier.

caw

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Good observation: to go from amost ten thousand years as an agrarian society to the recent few centuries of an industrial society required we start prohibiting our previously-employable-on-the-farm kids from the new jobs in those new things called factories. And it took quite a few killed kids and lost kids' limbs before we finally agreed to prohibit kids from the factories.

waylander said:

I agree with Don and Blacbird
If you look at most of history then 14/15 y.o.s were married off and pregnant in most societies because there were few other alternatives for them. That is, biologically, when females are at their most fertile and resilient to cope with pregnancy. Most of them did so in the context of extended family supporting them.

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I have never agreed with the nearly universal practice of 14 y.o girls being "married off" over the past several milenia. And that's exactly what happened to those little girls: they were handed over to some man. (So far as I know, the same was never inflicted upon ANY boys from ANY culture, although I could be wrong there.) And from a biological standpoint, I don't agree that 14 is the most ideal age to beceom pregnant. Perhaps 17 is the absolute earliest, but 14 is still too soon in human development IMO.




Meanwhile, there is one issue that sticks in my craw, and that's the 400 pound gorilla in the room of flat out desire. By the time many kids hit 16 (not all kids, not even most kids, just many kids) they are just DYING to get laid, the drive is so intense. Holding them back is tantamount to cruelty IMO. And expecting them to tough it out and stay celibate until they are 21 or even 25 is just delusional. It's only been in the past 100 years that we began raising the cultural age minumum for a "respectable" (and now LEGAL) marriage age. So for a piddling little 100 years we have been fighting a losing battle against a solid quarter million years of evolutionary programming. And elsewhere here at P&CE (about 6 months ago) I replied to a thread about teen pregnancy and about Bristol Palin's baby in which I added that even in the Bible girls got married in their early to mid teens. Trying to change that time table disagrees not only with Darwin but even with the Bible. So take your pick as to which one of those two sources of cautionary wisdom you want to heed with this whole conundrum.

As a woman about to turn thirty, I would have preferred to have children earlier when I had more energy and optimism, and I really resent the way the economics of my life have made it basically impossible for me to have children even though I'd really like to. I could certainly see as a utopia a clan-based society where women were expected to start having children around 18 or 20 and those children would be cared for by the clan, not the responsibility of a harried young couple or single mother.

But 14 is too young, there are medical studies that demonstrate pretty conclusively that pregnancy under age 16 or so stunts a woman's growth and does long-term damage to her health.

Smish said:

Whether people help their teenage daughters raise babies depends on how Americanized they are? I have no idea what "Americanized" even means. Care to explain?

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It's true there was a better word I could've used, but I didn't feel like to engage in the arguing with the 67% of the US population that would've followed. So I used "Americanized" instead.

Why are there no buffalo or nomadic peoples on the plains? I'll answer for you. The survivors got "americanized". ( The nomadic people I mean, not the buffalo.)