Adulthood especially motherhood seems to a wonderful pleasure but to keep this journey as pleasurable as possible, mothers need to manage their finance well and make the best efforts to stay out of debt as much as possible. However, the need and the growing burden of student loan, credit card debt, mortgages and others make their transition uneasy and few even postpone their motherhood due to their constant and somewhat unbearable debt burden. Therefore, the role of personal debt cannot be ignored in the transition to parenthood.
To help you understand things in a far better way, there are several data to be explored and analyzed. These data are available in different website and reliable sources such as National Longitudinal Study of Youth -1997 cohort. The data and facts show that:
- The young generation especially the women are coming of age and it is more prominent and fast evolving since early last decade.
- It is also found and very surprisingly that student loans delay fertility for women and few even postpone the thought of bearing children.
- Young women in particular are at a very high level of debt due to socio-economic reason and gender gap in earning.
- When it comes to parenthood, credit card debt and home mortgages in contrast seems to be precursors and more predominant.
All these facts and results indicate that there are different implications of different forms of debts when it comes to early adulthood transitions. It can be said that:
- Consumer loans or home mortgages increase immediate access to consumption goods and
- A significant delay is noticed often between the accrual and recognition of benefits for student loans.
Debts are usually double-edged in nature because both facilitator and barrier to life evolutions highlights the prominence of considering debts in any form as a monetary issue as well as a carrier of social connotations.
The key transitions
There are several key transitions in life that occurs relatively early. These transitions that are noticed at the earliest stages of adulthood are:
- Completion of education
- Launching an independent household
- Establishing a new career
- Marriage and
- Birth of the first child.
For this, it is particularly important to make early life transitions most successful in someone’s life trajectory.
When these key transitions were studied closely it emerged that these are all a primary focus on the sociology and social sciences in general. Studies conducted on young adult transitions show maximum utilization of a life course approach typically. This approach helps to see these transitions as influenced both by the social position and age of the people undergoing such transition phase.
It is also seen that most importantly, it is the historical circumstances at this particular point in life is the most significant factor.
Life course approach
The life course approaches resonate very well with the central sociological concerns with regards to intersection of history and biography. There are different key concepts in life course approach including:
- The timing of events
- The connecting of lives across generations and
- The networking of lives and history.
In particular, it is about the economic hardships and responses of the youth to these hardships that are identified as primary influencing factors on the early life transition stages along with the subsequent outcomes of life.
Studies conducted on contemporary cohorts of young mothers suggest a troubled and an increasingly complex transition to adulthood. It is due to:
- The increasingly fragmented family formation at early life stages
- Fragmented education and
- Delayed and recurring traditional normative sequence.
The primary causes of such fragmented transitions are manifold and include:
- More expensive and longer periods of education
- Difficulty in finding a secured jobs and
- Reduced or delayed childbirth
- Inadequate earnings and savings.
Analyzing and realizing these dynamics shows carrying of more personal debts for young people especially women and would-be mothers. The significances of such personal debts incurred in early life transition stages seem to be the primary cause for potential delays in motherhood for its particular prominence.
Debt and fertility
Incurring debts at a young age is particularly influential in the adult life course. Most of the young people male and female alike have a growing demand of spending more in the late teens to the mid-20s. All these spending are not unnecessary though and are for education, developing the resources for their first jobs such as clothing and transportation for work, and setting up an independent household.
However, the slow growth in income results in incurring debt which in turn plays the major role in enabling and limiting the key transitions such as fertility in the initial years rather than later when their economic lives may have become more secure. All these result in more debts and inability to pay back. Debt settlement or consolidation seems to be the only way out. If you do not know about it you are welcome to click here to know more about debt settlement companies and its meaning if you want.
Conceptually, it is most prospective that debt will exert short-term effects on the transmission of large life decisions and its timing such as fertility along with several other factors that influence fertility such as postsecondary education. On the other hand it is highly unlikely that indebtedness will have a significantly large influence in changing these decisions to have children at all though it may affect the timing of fertility.
Indeed, there are other factors that will affect fertility such as class and race predominantly converging across the social groups and influence the timing and patterning as well.
Similarly, when debt and marriage is analyzed it is found that debt also affects marriage by delaying it but not encouraging the youth to forego it altogether.
All these studies mean that fertility timing is the most important dimension of the social groups and social differentiation among the youth. Contraception use is more favored now than to become a mother in debt.
Given this situation it is urgently needed to have more fairness, transparency, clarity and insurance against the downsides of loans and good quality credit to ensure transition to adulthood is not costly or uneasy.