There are many models of forming a family in terms of age, but we'll look at two main ones:
1) Early marriage.
2) Marriage around 30.
By early marriage I mean getting married between 18 and 26. By marriage around 30 I mean roughly 30 or a bit older.
Chances are your parents, grandparents and other relatives and acquaintances married around 20. They saw it as normal because everyone did. Everyone in their circle did, because their circle was made up entirely of people from one country. The average age of marriage varies from country to country and culture to culture. But in general there's a clear pattern: the poorer the country, the earlier people marry. There are two reasons. First, doing things as a couple is always faster and easier than alone. This goes back to earlier centuries when people earned their living mainly through physical labour. Every family had a household to maintain. Two people manage that much more easily than one. So people married from 18–20, and in earlier centuries perhaps even younger. The second reason lies in state ideology. If a society promotes early marriage, that's no accident. The state has a strong interest. Why — we'll come to that in the next paragraph.
So imagine a young man and woman marrying at 20. Think of yourself at 20. What does the average person have by 20 and how developed are they?
1) A car.
2) A flat.
3) Enough work experience to find another job easily if they lose the current one.
4) A solid base of knowledge to move up the career ladder.
What does the average twenty-year-old have from this list? Nothing. On top of that, children are likely to come soon. I have nothing against children — on the contrary, I'm for birth rates — but at that age they're more of a burden on the family. That's why many end up in care: someone can't support them because they don't have any of the four things above. Responsible parents who are happy in their marriage start devoting all their time to the children and no longer have time for their own education. One of them may be on parental leave and so gets less money than at work, and state benefits don't cover 100% of their previous pay. A catastrophic shortage of money sets in. Life on credit begins. One loan for home repairs, another for a car, and so on without end. Coming back to the second reason (state ideology), we can conclude that such a person is very useful to the state. First, they're a permanent borrower; second, they have no financial cushion if they're made redundant, so they can be denied bonuses and raises and kept below market pay.
Now imagine another scenario. Say you're 28. You have a flat or at least a decent car. Of course that's small compared to work experience, a partly built career and a base of knowledge. And you have a financial cushion for life's various contingencies. At 28 you also know better what you want from life and have some experience, unlike couples who marry at 20 a year or two after college or university. Obviously the later-marriage option is better in every way. Of course there are downsides: the younger you are, the healthier you are, and so are your children. And not everyone can hold out until 28 without marrying or having children. So everyone has to choose what matters more: marriage at 20 and a life of living from paycheck to paycheck with at best a cheap trip to Turkey or Egypt every two or three years, or getting your life in order by around 30 and then depending much less on money and allowing yourself far more for the rest of your life. Most will choose the first. But as I wrote in a blog post: "Those who can wait always end up achieving more in life than those who seize the moment here and now".
There's another reason why marriage around 30 works better than at 20: your children's potential. Those who have already achieved something and built some kind of career can give their children far more than those who marry at 20. That goes for education and passing on knowledge (children copy a lot from their parents — what good can they copy from 20-year-old parents?) as well as material things, emotional support, memorable trips and much else. Marriages at twenty already make their children hostages to the situation and witnesses to the rat race their parents are in.
