I have a sibling who married at age 18 and is now being divorced after 20+ years of an often stormy marriage. My parents were not in favor of the marriage back then but supported their child nevertheless.
While having gotten married early is not necessarily the reason for these broken homes, I don't think it helped either. Here are some excerpts from a paper that looks at whether some of the problematic results of early marriage are caused by the earliness itself of the marriage:
Women who marry while in their teens are two-thirds more likely to divorce within 15 years of their wedding compared with women who postpone marriage.
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Although teen marriage and low education are associated with a variety of below-average outcomes, it is not necessarily true that these choices caused the bad outcomes. For example, differences may be due to preexisting characteristics of women who marry young versus later, rather than any causal relationship between teen marriage and negative adult outcomes. To my knowledge, no previous research has studied the causal effect of early marriage. Yet, understanding the causal effect of teens’ choices is key for understanding whether they are making choices they will later regret or which impose costs on their children and society. If teenage marriage and dropping out of high school are largely driven by unobserved personal characteristics that are the primary cause of negative outcomes, legal interventions to prevent these choices may make little difference. However, if strong causal effects exist, then state laws restricting teenagers’ choices have the potential to greatly lessen the chances of future poverty.
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CONCLUSION
Do the negative effects associated with early teen marriage and dropping out of school reflect unmeasured characteristics or the true consequences of a teen’s choices? To better understand the effect of women’s early decisions on future life outcomes, this article examines variation over time and across states in the laws that regulate early marriage, school attendance, and child labor. Based on using these laws as instruments for early marriage and high school completion, the results indicate strong negative effects on poverty status that are not due to self selection. The baseline IV estimates imply that women who marry young are 31 percentage points more likely to live in poverty when they are older. Similarly, women who drop out of school are 11 percentage points more likely to be in families below the poverty line. The IV results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications and estimation methods, including LIML estimation and a control function approach. In comparison, OLS estimates are sensitive to how the data are aggregated; regressions on individual-level data estimate small effects for early teen marriage, while aggregated data estimate large effects. I argue that the difference is due to a large amount of measurement error in the early marriage variable, resulting in substantial attenuation bias in the individual-level OLS regressions but not the aggregated OLS or IV regressions.
The results imply that the decisions women make early in life can have long-lasting consequences. The IV estimates suggest that legal restrictions that prevent early marriage and mandate high school completion have the potential to greatly reduce the chances of future poverty for a woman and her family. The implication is that legal restrictions on teenagers’ choices can reduce external costs imposed on society, and it is possible they also prevent some teens from making decisions they will later regret.
Gordon B. Dahl, Early Teen Marriage and Future Poverty
We have already started to instill in our children the expectation that they will finish college or other preparation for a good job and will not marry in their teens. A little extra maturity can only be a good thing before one enters into the grand adventure of starting a family.
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