A Washington Post article today looks at college graduates in their twenties who are marrying and having children earlier than their peers. In metropolitan areas, 13 percent of men and 31 percent of women with college degrees between the ages of 25 and 29 have children, compared to 49 percent of men and 62 percent of women without college degrees. The Post focuses mostly on the social stigma that younger, educated parents feel: the awkward questions about whether the pregnancy was planned, and the distance felt between the younger parents and older moms and dads on the playground. But if we scratch the surface and consider what really sets these young parents apart from their supposedly carefree peers, it's one thing: money. Consider Amy Elliott, 28, who is raising her toddler while attending George Washington University law school and living in a Silver Spring, MD home with a kinda fancy kitchen (you can see it in the accompanying web video). I wonder what Elliott's husband does? Who is paying her law school tuition? Does the couple receive financial help from their parents? Do they own their home, or are they paying rent? The article doesn't give a clue. Other couples profiled in the piece are attorneys, or are employed at the World Bank and other D.C. institutions where highly-educated young people are quite well paid. Nobody in the piece is working at a non-profit, or struggling to get a career rolling in media or the arts. If they were, they wouldn't yet be able to raise kids with the upper-middle-class lifestyle portrayed in the piece. In other words, the couples here aren't giving up on their careers to raise children, as the article suggests, but rather are able to have kids in large part because they have been conventionally careerist throughout their early and mid-twenties. Either that, or they're receiving substantial help from families or through inheritances, a possibility the Post ignores completely. I don't mean to reject the choices of young parents, who have a long, energetic retirement to look forward to -- if they can afford to retire. Many of us will end up envying them. Rather, I think journalism should reveal the economic and financial contexts that make these choices possible and acceptable for some people, but not for others. For many working Americans in their twenties, the thought (or reality) of raising children and owning property is incredibly financially daunting. Twenty percent are uninsured, and the average young American now changes jobs every 1 to 2 years, meaning stability can be hard to come by. A quarter of all college graduates carry a heavy debt burden from the costs of their educations. Just stuff to keep in context when we're talking about Generation Y's ability to parent, even with the benefit of a college degree. --Dana Goldstein
