Child brides pose new challenge in ongoing refugee crisis

[hunter]

52. We have similar issues in our community with immigrant farmworkers from various places...

... where it's considered ordinary for a sixteen year old to be married with one or two children. These young mothers consider themselves to be fully adult, making adult decisions in every way. And in many ways they are, masters of their own domains, taking care of their children and households, making the meals, doing the laundry, changing the diapers, managing the money, etc., while their husbands are working.

It wasn't so long ago in the U.S.A., in some long established communities, where such relationships were ordinary and nobody considered them abusive.

I have quite a few ancestors who had their first child when they were fifteen or sixteen years old.

Our modern society is quite a bit more complicated, however, and kids are expected to have much more education and experience before we consider them competent to make decisions about life altering events such as marriage and children.

Having babies truly does interfere with education and work experience, middle, high school, and beyond.

My wife and I had our first child after we'd graduated from college and both of us had a few years work experience. Our first child was born after my wife had started graduate school. She didn't take any time off from school, but my wife is a very remarkable woman, nursing a child in one arm, reading a heavy textbook full of hard sciences and maths held in her other arm.

Our kids were straight-A students through high school, and then always distraught when they'd get a B or two in college, mostly from professors they didn't grok, or professors who didn't grok them. It's probably because my wife always read to them as children, not just things like Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, but also some very hard-core biochemistry, genetics, human anatomy, and statistics.

I tended to stick more to the children's books in my own reading to our children.

6502 and x86 microprocessor code, network topology, and even blood banking (which was my work at the time), isn't easy to read aloud to small children as poetry. x86 code and everything else Intel or Microsoft is especially ugly.

Older and more experienced, I could probably read 6502, and later, ARM code to children as poetry, or blood banking stuff, but x86 stuff is still like being tied up in some torture chamber dungeon and made to speak while chewing on marbles until they shatter, along with your teeth, making you spit blood. Not something to be shared with children.