[ImStillToni]

Originally Posted by Lanfear

I completely agree that parents should be your parents not your friends but I have no clue where you get the idea that the generation gap is getting smaller? Unless that is a USA specific statistic (and I really hope that the teen pregnancy rate is not that horrible yet) people are getting married and having babies later in life than ever before in history.
Not only that also the gap between generally more conservative old and more liberal young people has been getting more pronounced. Yes some of us 30 something's feel like we never really grew up but I am pretty sure a normal teenager thinks I am a boring old dinosaur with no clue what is hip.

Simple. I was born in 1978. Back then, most of my friends parents as well as mine were in their 30s and our grandparents in our 60s. Today you will find grandmothers are in their 30s with their kids and then the grandbabies. People are often surprised when I tell them my grandparents are in the 80s and get asked how they are even still alive - its like unfathomable to some people.

The amount of years between generations has in fact shifted and as a person who cannot have kids, you tend to observe those with kids....which believe me is EVEYRONE at this point and they are all younger than me lol. Wrote a couple of papers about the topic (can our country be sustainable with a decreasing generational gap) in the past few years so I wasn't just pulling it out my ass. Perhaps it is something many people overlook because fertility is not an issue but believe me, I can count on one hand the people I know who have been pregnant recently (at least the past 5 yrs if not more) that were over the age of 30. I have had only 3 friends have kids while my husband's had 1 sibling and 10 cousins pop out at least 19 babies in the same span. I shit you not, 1 aunt has 3 girls with a total of 7 kids and they are all younger than me. If the oldest is now 30 and her mother (the grandmother) is now 52 and there is a 9 yo old grandbaby, you can see the gap averages around 18-21 years or so. The generational gap used to average 30 years....now its in the twenties with a slight increase as you said to older folks having kids and ART, but still much shorter than it used to be.

"The generation interval of a particular family depends on the age of the parents when the first child is born. At the present time there are a lot of unplanned teenage pregnancies on the one hand, and on the other married couples often wait until their late twenties or thirties before starting a family."

"The generation interval for a family is defined as the average age of the parents when the children were born. This is worked out for each parent separately and the mean is then taken of these two figures. The average generation interval is usually about 30 years."

http://=http://www.genetic-genealogy...115570142.html

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nv...01.pdf#table02

just an example, but you can GTS as Lauren would say!