When I was home for a few weeks this summer, I was stunned to hear about all of my high school classmates who were engaged, married, or parents. At 21 years-old, the idea of marriage seems as distant to me as buying a house or having kids. But the thing is, I'm 21 — not 17 or even 18, which is the age that Sarah Palin's daughter and boyfriend are getting hitched.

In 2008, getting married after an unexpected pregnancy seems like a myth. Girls in high school don't want to get married and their overprotective fathers no longer force them into it — in fact, most times a girl would be better off having a baby into the supportive family life she grew up in instead of dropping out of school and struggling to support a child with two GEDs.

From The Fading Attraction on Teen Marriage from the New York Times, reg. required:

The median marrying age for women in the late 1950s was about 19, according to David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University and an emeritus professor of sociology there. But a marriage between 19-year-olds — or even 17- or 18-year-olds — then would not have been described as a “teenage marriage,” he said. It was too routine to be given a special label.

There is no way to know how many of those unions were prompted by a pregnancy — a phenomenon that has decreased sharply in the population in recent decades as the marriage rate itself has declined, sociologists say.

Studies show that today teenage marriages are two to three times more likely to end in divorce than are marriages between people 25 years of age and older. The most comprehensive study on marriage and age that sociologists cite was published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2001, from 1995 data, and it found that 48 percent of those who marry before 18 are likely to divorce within 10 years, compared with 24 percent of those who marry after age 25.

Think of all the soul-searching and life-living that goes on between the ages of 16 and 21. Now factor in a husband, a child and a mortgage. Yikes. While I think it's too quick to call teen marriage a returning trend, I also think it's very interesting that two famous families that have dealt with young pregnancies – Palin and Spears – have released statements along the lines of "Yeah, we have a teen pregnant daughter, but it's okay… they're engaged!"

Out of curiosity, I clicked around trying to find statistics of what percentage of teen marriages involve pre-engagement pregnancy, but no luck. What are your thoughts? Are you familiar with any young couples who got married in or right out of high school just for the sake of being married?

Categorized under: Youth Marketing

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