My parents’ generation got married before they started a family and most children grew up inside a secure two-parent family unit. Cam and I were both born in 1968 and while we were younger than some of our peers when we married at 23, we waited 5 years into the marriage before we started a family.
According to Statistics NZ, most people born in the 1980s married before starting a family but New Zealand’s present generation does not share that same view of marriage or family.
In the early 1980s, 77 percent of babies were born to married parents. More recently this has dropped to 53 percent.
“A further 30 percent of births today are to parents in a de facto relationship, couples who usually live together in a relationship akin to marriage,” population indicators manager Tehseen Islam said.
“Adults born in the 1980s are much less likely to follow the past practice of having babies after marriage.”
Statistics NZ has released a report called Good things take time. It looks at the timing of key life events for two generations of people – parents born in 1960 and their children born in 1984.
Findings show that compared with people born in the 1960s, those born in the 1980s are on average:
- older when they marry
- older when they have children, with fewer women having them
- older if they divorce
- more likely to live longer.
“A couple born in 1960 were likely to have married in the early 1980s, when men were around 25 years old and women around 22,” […]
Fast-forward to more recent times when someone born in 1984 marries. They were most likely to have done so around 2012–15, when the median age at first marriage was around 30 years for males and 29 years for females.
Our 1980s-born women are generally about four years older when having their own children, compared with their early 1960s-born mothers. The median age of 1960s-born mothers at the birth of their child was 26. This has increased to just over 30 years for 1980s-born women.
The saddest thing about these statistics from my very traditional and conservative point of view, is that 47% of our young children, because they were not born into a family where their parents are married, are less likely to have a stable father figure in their lives growing up.
I understand that some couples consider themselves just as committed in a de facto relationship where they share a mortgage, children and bills. In reality, the government forcibly marries de facto couples without their consent. Once they have lived together the required number of years their assets will be split 50%-50% regardless of whether or not they chose to commit to each other officially.
I wonder if that has anything to do with people not bothering with marriage? What do you think? Why has marriage gone out of fashion and why are people not waiting till they are married to start a family?