According to a new study, college students are more eager to get married early than their parents would like them to.
Marriage and family life in a person's life is said to come much later in the new generation. Data has shown time and again that people of current times, especially young adults are more interested in their career rather than getting married and settling down. A new study from researchers at the Brigham Young University found that parents may have a big role to play in this delay.
According to the study, more than half of college students think that 25 is the right age to get married. However, parents of most of these college students think that 25 may be a little too early to take on the responsibility of marriage and a family.
"The assumption has been that the younger generation wants to delay marriage and parents are hassling them about when they would get married," said Brian Willoughby, a professor at Brigham Young University and lead author of the study in a report published in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. "We actually found the opposite, that the parental generation is showing the 'slow down' mindset more than the young adults."
Researchers gathered information from over 536 college students and their parents across five college campuses around the country. It was found that it wasn't just the girl's parents who wanted their daughter to get married at an older age, but this delay was consistent across both genders.
"Initially we thought that this might be dads wanting their daughters to delay marriage," Willoughby said. "Moms and dads trended together -- gender wasn't a factor."
According to the report published in Science Daily, education was one of the reasons that kept parents from wanting their child to get married early. They first wanted their children to get a proper education and then think about marriage. According to most parents who took part in the study, 27 years or older was a good age to get married.
"I think parents have a lot of fear for their kids that make them want to delay the transitions to adulthood," Willoughby said.
"What happens is that someone thinks that 25 is when they want to get married," Willoughby said. "So at age 25, they start changing their patterns around dating, and it takes two or so years to make the transition."
