Today’s young adults are SO MUCH younger than I was at that age

You've probably seen similar stats before, but check this out:

In 1970, only 38 million Americans were unmarried — divorced or separated, widowed, or never married. They accounted for just 28 percent of all Americans 18 and older. By 2019, more than three times as many were unmarried, about 118 million. They account for nearly half of all adults in the U.S. (47 percent).

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One reason the number of unmarried Americans has been increasing over the past half-century is that the age at which adults in the U.S. get married, of those who do marry, has been climbing. As the graph below shows, in 1950 and 1960, the median age at which women got married for the first time was just a little over 20. That means that about half of the women marrying for the first time were teenagers! At nearly 23, the men weren’t that much older.

Now (as of 2020), the median age at which men first marry in the U.S. is 30.5. That means that about half of the men who are marrying for the first time are older than 30. About half of the women are older than 28.

When my youngest started at Georgetown a few years ago, she shared a house with 4 other girls. My daughter was the only one of them who knew how to clean a toilet, how to mop a floor, literally how to change a lightbulb. She was also the only one who was not taking anti-depressants, but that's another story. Her roommates wanted to hire a cleaning lady. They're 18 years old. My daughter told them that there was absolutely no way that her parents would pay her share for a cleaning lady. So she went to Home Depot, bought mops, buckets, and other cleaning supplies, showed everyone how to do everything and assigned tasks.

Try to imagine any of those other 18-year-old girls married, with a husband and kids, running a household.

It's worse with boys. There are so many 30-year-old "men" playing video games, living with their parents. So many. Henry David Thoreau was an anomaly. Now, he's the norm. Which is fine, I suppose, unless you're a young woman looking for a husband. Then it's not fine.

Our young adults used to be adults. Now they're just young.

So, so young.

I was born in 1968. In 1987, at 18 years old, I was living with my Swedish girlfriend on the Finnish border north of the Baltic. We were young. But we were mature enough to work jobs, maintain a household, and understand the importance of finances, future planning, and family. We didn't do everything right. But we were adults.

It didn't work out. We found other spouses. Who were also adults. We made do. As best we could. Sometimes life doesn't work out the way you'd like it to. But we made do. As best we could.

We were adults.

My daughters are in their early to mid-20s now, and most of their friends are children. Twenty to thirty-year-old children. Those were rare specimens in the days of Henry David Thoreau. But today they are common.

It's good that children aren't marrying, I suppose. They're children. They can't handle responsibility. But we need adults. And if our twenty-something-year-olds are still children, then who are the adults?

Every society needs adults.

My youngest daughter turns 23 soon. When my Mother was 23, she was living on a military base, she had a husband in the military during Vietnam, she had two small children, and she had enormous responsibilities. Which she handled the best she could. She made some mistakes, I'm sure. She was young. But she was an adult.

We now have legions of college graduates who don't know how to clean a toilet.

If we can't produce adults, capable of dealing with reality, then our society disappears. Quickly.

Western Civilization is dying. Of suicide.

Raise your children well. It matters. It matters more than you can imagine.