"You can have a career at anytime. But you only have a short period where you can be a young, hot mom."

Catch the 30 Rock quote? With Mother's Day quickly approaching, I thought I would share my thoughts on something that's been bugging me for quite a while. Over the course of our engagement and marriage, I've seen a host of articles promoting the advantages of getting married young, most recently this one from Slate. Not one of those articles has ever mentioned children.

Now, before I get to my thoughts on this topic, I just want to say that if you, single or married, want nothing more than to have a baby, I want that for you too. If you are avoiding pregnancy based on serious reasons related to your physical, mental, or financial health, I've been there and I feel for you as well. 

It's just that, from a secular standpoint, I know there are plenty of advantages to postponing children, especially in terms of one's career and finances. We would certainly be able to buy a house a lot sooner if we had taken that path! But there also many non-religious reasons to get married young and have kids shortly afterwards. The fact is, there are sacrifices to be made either way. What a couple gives up by postponing children is just somehow never mentioned.   

My husband and I are twenty-three years old. We will celebrate our third wedding anniversary this summer and welcome our second child this fall. 

We started dating at fifteen and got married before my senior year and his junior year of college. As the very fortunate recipients of full-tuition academic scholarships, we were nearly financially independent since entering college. After our wedding, we were able to make ends meet on our student budget without much stress. I graduated in May 2011 and worked as a nanny until our daughter arrived shortly before my husband’s graduation the following year.

It had always been our plan for my husband to pursue a PhD, but when he received a very generous job offer from a major tech company during his senior year, we couldn’t pass up such a promising opportunity. After his graduation, we moved across the country to the west coast, where my husband works as a software developer and I stay home with our very rambunctious toddler. 

We consider ourselves extremely blessed to have begun our lives together at such an early age. We have the SAT to thank for paving the way to our happiness because without the scholarships that led to our financial stability, we could not have gotten married in college. We attribute my husband’s job offer more to good fortune and a practical major rather than purely hard work. In this uncertain economy, a stable job can be hard to come by, especially right after college.

    There is quite the stigma attached to marrying young and even more attached to having kids young. If one sees a couple in their early twenties playing with a toddler at the park, one might assume certain things. Maybe they got pregnant and felt obliged to wed? Maybe they’re Mormon? I usually wonder if they’d like to be friends. 

  The more pessimistic might think the mother and father in the park are sacrificing the happiness that stems from achieving educational and career goals to provide for their children. While I am proud of my college degree, I can say without a doubt that the happiest moments of my life are enthusiastically answering my husband’s proposal, reciting my wedding vows, seeing a positive pregnancy test, meeting my daughter for the first time, and discovering that she will be a big sister.

If more young people were willing to entertain the possibility of marriage and, in particular, of having children soon into their marriage, I am confident they could experience the same joy. While it is certainly true that these moments will be still be there when they’ve achieved their professional aspirations, there are more than a few advantages to starting a family sooner rather than later. 

 I have always dreamed of staying home with my children in their formative years. If my husband and I had gotten married when we did but both worked for five years after graduation, it would have been difficult to adjust to one income when we eventually had children and I left my job to care for them. Because we welcomed our daughter shortly before my husband graduated and started his career, we experienced quite the opposite phenomenon. While we technically had two incomes before her birth, thanks to on-campus jobs and summer internships, when we transitioned to one income we also more than tripled our take-home pay.

  Assuming one is in a committed relationship with the necessary financial resources, the younger one has children, the healthier it is for both mother and baby. At our church mom’s group a few weeks ago, we had a disheartening conversation about trying for a second, third, or fourth child.  Most were worried about the likelihood of conceiving again or the increased risk of genetic abnormalities. As the next youngest member of the group is twelve years my senior, I did not have much to contribute to the conversation. 

However, I can attest to the benefits of youth when complications arise. Our daughter was born premature via emergency caesarean. Age plays a large role in recovering from a c-section in both the short and long term. I was off pain medication and feeling back to normal long before the standard six-week recovery period. This much shorter recovery time is greatly attributed to my age. I am not in amazing shape nor have an extremely high pain tolerance. Our daughter’s dramatic entrance into the world has had little effect on the timing and risks of my second pregnancy, once again largely due to my age.

    We will be forty when our oldest child graduates from high school. Instead of backpacking through Europe on a shoestring budget in our twenties, maybe we’ll treat ourselves to a little more luxurious version of the same trip in our forties. We spent a semester abroad in college and have stayed in more than enough hostels to last a lifetime. Perhaps more significantly, we will have at least twenty-five years before retirement. Although we contribute the employer-matched amount to my husband’s 401k, we can devote the larger portion of our savings to college funds for the time-being because we’ll have decades to make up the difference later. I am aware of the many obstacles, but if I decide to enter the work force when our children are grown, I will have plenty of time to do so. 

My family is my greatest source of happiness. With the United States’ average life expectancy hovering in the late seventies, there is a good chance that my husband and I will be around to enjoy the future generations of our family. Starting a family at a young age will hopefully allow us to spend more time with our grandchildren and quite possibly great-grandchildren. As our parents are all healthy and in their early to mid-fifties, there is also the likely prospect that they will be around for many years and will establish a strong, lasting bond with their grandchildren.

  If my husband and I are blessed to make it to our fiftieth or sixtieth anniversary celebration, I highly doubt we will look around the room full of our descendants and feel anything but gratitude for starting our family when we did. If one of us passes away tomorrow, we will feel even more thankful for every day we spent united with the people we love.