America’s incarceration rate is in decline

>Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated. This matters because young offenders are the raw material that feeds the prison system: As one generation ages out, another takes its place on the same horrid journey.

Another factor which will soon impact this, if it isn't already, is the rapidly changing nature of youth. Fertility rates have been dropping since 2009 or so. Average age of parents is increasing. Teen pregnancy on a long and rapid decline.

All of these working together means that each year the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources. Which in turn should mean fewer youth delinquency, which as the article notes is how most in prison started out.

> the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources

This is both good and bad. Having a child is very difficult, but it gets harder as you get older. You lack a lot of monitory resources as a teen or the early 20s, but you have a lot more energy, as you get older your body starts decaying you will lack energy. A kid had at 40 will still be depending on your when you are 55 (kids is only 15), and if the kids goes to college may have some dependency on you when your peers are retiring. Plus if your kids have kids young as well as you, you be around and have some energy for grandkids.

Don't read the above as advocating having kids too young, it is not. However don't wait until you think it is the perfect time. If you are 25 you should be seriously thinking in the next 2 years, and by 30 have them (if of course kids are right for you - that is a complex consideration I'm not going to get into). Do not let fear of how much it will cost or desire for more resources first stop you from having kids when you are still young enough to do well.

I had my children at 36 and 38, and I'm the mother, and energy-wise, I've had no issues. Yes, they considered me to be of "advanced maternal age" in the OB department and gave me special treatment due to it, but my doctors told me that the "advanced maternal age" threshold (35) was based off outdated research anyway. In the bay area, most of the mothers I've met were around that age, and my friends are having their kids at the same age.

It was really nice that I had time to establish my career and figure things out before having kids.

The issue here is this can lead people to pushing it till 40+.

I was talking to a nice girl up until she mentioned still wanting kids in her late 40s. Maybe I’m old school, but telling someone you froze your eggs the same day you meet them is weird.

Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle.

This rapidly transformed into no, get your masters, get 8 years of experience. Earn at least 300k as a couple. Then and only then should you consider a family. Childcare is 3k plus a month in many places.

For myself , I wish I made this happen in my mid 20s. I had to move back home to take care of a family member (fck cancer) and I suffered various personal setbacks due to it.

In my 30s I’ve let go of expecting anything. This world has already given me so much.

> Society itself is broken. You SHOULD be able to graduate high school and make enough to support yourself and a family with a bit of struggle

This has literally only been true for about 30 years out of the sum total of human history, would you like to guess when those 30 years happened to be?

Obviously the answer is "1950s america".

For the rest of human history, you needed something beyond the education you received until the age of 18 in order to support a family.

People supported families with single incomes with less than high school education for centuries before the 1950s.

All the other members of the family were active and produced useful things - both kids and women. The iddle lifestyle was limited to richer classes.

In foraging societies - ie, most people for the vast majority of human history - people worked ~15–20 hours/week on subsistence tasks. The rest was leisure or social time (ie, time for being a human later rebranded as 'idleness').

Industrialization has pushed inequality to extremes while raising hours worked - even as productivity keeps shooting up. There's no good reason for people to tolerate this; it's just exploitation.