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Doug:

While Ashleigh's story is a sad one, it is important to also tell the bigger story and that is that teenage birth rates are at the lowest levels EVER recorded in this country (see the figures compiled by Child Trends). Teen pregnancy rates are also at relatively low levels. In this regard, at least, teens seem to be making better decisions than they were a generation ago.

Dave,

You're right about the trend, but there's a very important subplot there, which you can glean from this report:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr49/nvsr49_10.pdf

Basically, it's when teen birth rates were higher 50 years ago, most of the teen mothers were married. Now they're not. The proportion of births to unmarried teens is increasing dramatically. Perhaps we would agree that a baby born to a 19-year-old married woman is likely to have a more secure start in life than a baby born to a 16-year-old unmarried girl. However, teen birth rate, even for unmarried girls, is declining as you noted, so overall the trend is positive.

Doug:

The proportion of teen births that are nonmarital is no longer increasing, having reached nearly all such births (about 80 percent)in the mid-1990s. Unfortunately, those earlier marital births weren't such great outcomes either, as early marriages tend (and tended) to be more likely to dissolve.

It's also important to note that births among unmarried teens have fallen at the same time that births to other unmarried women have risen. For a more recent cite from the CDC see http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr55/nvsr55_01.pdf.

The reason for bringing these numbers up is that the context of falling birth rates for married and unmarried teens is an important one to keep in mind.

Getting back to your original post, it appears that your generation and my generation needed much more help with their decision making than this one does.

Interesting assertion, that today's young people are more responsible and make better decisions than did earlier generations of Americans.

I guess you'd have to look at a lot of indicators in addition to teen births: drug and alcohol abuse, trouble with the law, educational attainment, video game addiction, etc.

I'm not sure what you'd find.

Doug, Dave:

I think my generation is a mixed bag at best. I mean, we're too busy to sit down for even 10 minutes and read a newspaper.

Original post: I think it's better to have children when you're past your teenage years and settling down. The 18-year-old state of mind is still maturing and is a lot different from the 25-year-old state of mind.

Thanks, Chad.

I agree about the ideal age to enter parenthood. You need some time to grow up before taking on that huge responsibility ... but you don't want to wait too long. I think it would have been tougher for me to invest as much energy in young children in my 40s than it was in my 30s.

I think you've had cooler weather down there in Florida than we've had here lately. That's really not fair.