“These two are four years apart.”
There’s a huge maturity difference in people at 16 & 20 vs. 20 & 24, or 24 & 28. Most marriages at 16-20 end in divorce or poverty FOR THE WOMAN!
“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.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3000061/
But when arguing in favor of marrying them young to control (i.e. USE THEM), remember to keep them barefoot and pregnant, too!
Some of you people really do sicken me!
I took a look at the study. It does not control for race or socio-economic status. It could just as easily be said that a characteristic of underclass women is that they both drop out of school and have kids at a young age. In the early days covered by the study (1950's thru 1970's) such women might get married at a young age. In current times, they just have kids at a young age without bothering with marriage at all.
Such women who have kids as teens are FAR more likely to be in poverty when they have kids outside marriage, than they were when they just married young.