good, but not great. happy but not bliss?

I do know there is definite research indicating that these later marriages produce later born children. And that there is evidence that waiting on starting a family, ~30 or older for the parents of children, is helpful for the children academically and socially for a variety of reasons. One of which being that the parents who typically wait until then tend to be more educated and already have some distance into their career fields as a result. If these conservatives were really at all concerned about families, they'd have noticed this research with definitive claims instead of this other research with wish-washy ones like "28+ year old people have unrealistically higher expectations or set routines" or some such. It seems more like the interest is to return women to functioning as brood mares who marry younger and thus potentially provide more children, and quickly, rather than to allow people to make individually useful decisions that may or may not conform to that supposedly idealized state they envision.

But then again, I haven't seen very many pundits of any variety saying that 30+ for children was a great idea. And as for myself, I don't care that much when, or even if, most people decide to have children. I think it's reasonable to avoid too many teenagers (high school-ers anyway) getting pregnant or causing pregnancies because this causes a litany of externality costs: lack of completed formal education, sunk costs into child-bearing, health care, likelihood of divorce or separation increases, increase in crime rate a generation out, and so on. That's about as far as that line of paternalistic decision making goes. Children, along with getting married, seems to be a deeply personal decision of the variety best left up to individuals to make. There are plenty of people out there who are inclined to tell us how to make it their way. We should welcome such advice but always consider its source and its validity to our own decisions.