This is an underrated perspective. My wife's mom became a mother at 18, she certainly had a stressful 20's, but by her 30's, she was just a mom working at a bank as a teller, and by her 40's she was a woman in the back office with grown children, and now at 50 she's a VP of something or other with several grandchildren.

Society so heavily stigmatizes teen pregnancy that she still thinks of herself as kind of a screwup, but minus all the self-doubt, it seems like about as well as a life could possibly go.

In German there's an old saying "Jung gefreit hat nie gereut", e.g. "married young, no regrets". It always seemed wrong when I was young but my kids are just out of the house now and my bones are already getting creaky. Maybe there's some truth to those old sayings...

Grass is always greener for me but I often think if I could do it over I'd rather have children as early as possible instead of in my late 30s.

I think if I had known how young late 30s and 40s actually is it may have resonated. Like, I still do all of the hobbies and activities I did in my 20s and am arguably in the best shape of my life, pandemic bod not withstanding. I think I truly felt my youth was fleeting and I wanted to be able to "enjoy it".

The reality is I squandered it in some ways and I feel a bit of sadness that my children will have a dad in his 60s by the time they are out of the house. Should have given that youthful energy to them with something to spare as adults. In reality I probably won't have much left when they become adults.

Such is life!

EDIT: Someone down thread makes another point that applied to us. By the time we were "ready", we found we had "unexplained infertility". Science helped us out but it wasn't fun, it was stressful, and pushed our parenthood even later than planned.

RE "unexplained fertility" - exact same thing happened to us.

We waited until we were "ready" (are we ever "ready"? certainly didn't feel like it when the baby arrived!) but it took about 4 years to actually have the baby. Miscarriages, then just nothing apart from endless mechanical & unromantic sex day after day after day for years, with deeply upsetting emotional consequences when nothing happened.

Everything checks out medically and the doctors cheerily just say "keep trying!" but then write "unexplained infertility" on your report as you plod back home for more fruitless intercourse. No one can explain why it is not working as the usual battery of tests they do come back fine ... you begin to envy and resent people you see who are pregnant, you cant look at a cute puppy/kitten because you feel like you'll never have a baby, you simmer with inner rage when someone at work brings in their baby to show around the office, or someone mentions their kids etc ..."HoW cAn thEYy bE sO INSENSITIVE?!?!?!?!" you fume to yourself as you die a little inside. It is quite the existential torture.

To HNers reading this: If this sounds like you, please do yourself a favor and find a clinic that deals with immune-related infertility. During consultations for starting IVF, one clinic casually noted that my wife had "natural killer" CD16+ and CD56+ cells that might be causing the miscarriage and no natural pregnancies. We immediately found a clinic that specialised in treating that condition and 2 months later we had a natural pregnancy that went full term - our baby boy was born 1 year ago and he is thriving. After 4 hard years of sorrow and misery, it just took some basic immune-modulating drugs and we got pregnant naturally after just two months, and a totally textbook baby (straight down the middle on weight & size etc) was born naturally with no complications. It can happen - good luck.

It depends what type of business you want to go into. If you're aiming for high finance/law/management/acting, it's improbable to get into without following the normal formula.

I disagree with all of those examples - most managers go into managing late in life. My partner, for example, is current a VP of Operations after diverting twenty years of their life to care for a son with special needs.

A whole lot of actors get into it later in life - but if you're talking about being a hollywood actor than yea - the chances of being a big movie star are vanishingly small no matter what you do.

A lot of really good lawyers go into the field after gaining experience in another specialty and there are some notable lawyers out there that didn't start practicing until well into their forties - it's a very different track than pre-law into a firm but it's quite doable.

On the topic of finance (or "high finance") unless you just generally mean "being rich" then I'd draw your eyes to the fact that the finance industry actually employs a disproportionately large number of women and boosts some of the best work/life balance you can find out there.

The normal formula is normal because it is the easiest to approach, but making shifts to your life later on in age is pretty cheap. You'd be surprised how little it costs you at 30 or 35 to start taking night classes[1] and transition to a new field - it's certainly not as easy as sticking with the same thing but it isn't particularly difficult.

1. If those are even needed, honestly formal education is a bit overvalued and having any formal education is generally transferable to other fields outside of highly specialized scientists - next time you're in the office ask around and see if one of your coworkers has a communications degree - they probably do.

Agreed, but that is like 0.1% of all people.

I have 3 girls and I am going to encourage them to have their kids when they are young so my wife and I are young enough to help her raise them while they pursues their studies/careers.

Similar situation here, we had our child in our early 20s, mid-university. It was tough for sure, and delayed both our schooling and our careers (mine was impacted more), and finances were tight sometimes, but it increasingly looks like it was monumental luck. We get to focus on careers as our teen naturally wants less to do with us.

Only downside seems to be that I'm a solid 5-7 years older than my equivalently experienced colleagues.

That was the norm until suddenly people started prioritizing money over procreation. Seems to be cultural and connected to the "abnormal" prosperity of the past and even more abnormal prosperity expectations set by the media.

Well thing is it most often ends up in parents splitting. Although I have such a case in my entourage and it worked but I think being religious helped them quite a bit ! (For the get pregnant by accident and keep it too, now that I think of it.)