Going to have Kids in your teens & 20s are ruining your life?

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' For a lot of guys, early parenting stinks of dreams abandoned and potential stifled. ''

When he got the phone call, Eamonn Horan-Lunney was 21 years old. It was September 1997, and he was an aspiring filmmaker settle in its third year of a degree in communications. Fan of Michael Moore, he wishes to make documentaries that would change the world by educating the masses on social issues. In the meantime, he enjoyed the Bohemian of a student life. Then one night, the girl that he had called him.

"It was Megan," recalls, "saying:"I'm pregnant."" ?

News blinded him.

"I was flabbergasted. Without a voice,"said Horan-Lunney, now 37 and an officer of the air transport industry. "How to react to this? Just to marvel at it for awhile. "The announcement, remembers, replaced the vague image of his future with a series of specific questions: what's next? What is my role? How is that going to change what I thought it was my life plan?
Megan was two years younger and began its first year of University.

Instantly, pregnancy has become the most important issue in their life, and the most important decision either had ever faced. They discussed abortion. They discussed adoption. They discussed the possibilities for the future, in excruciating detail.

"The conversations were kind and tender at the same time and really vicious and cruel to other times," remembers Horan-Lunney. "We talked about all the options available. He is emotional, and it's personal. Everything is on the table and gross. You are two young traverse much very quickly and it all kind of fate. "

They decided to keep the child.

"We determined that it was the way we were going," Horan-Lunney said, "and we both jumped on board.".

For many young men, fatherhood is more a threat than a promise. Pop culture reinforces the idea that becoming a dad initially ruins the life of a man by cutting short the roaring twenties. Perhaps for this reason, we expect later and later to become fathers. According to the National Center for family & marriage research, the average age in which a man becomes a dad is 16.8, but this goes up to 30.8 for men with a college education. Over the last century, the age where men get married has steadily increased, and we are going to have fewer children than at any other time in history. Thanks to these choices, we framed the marriage and fatherhood as roles that suit best left until later in life.

Perhaps for this reason, early fatherhood can highlight the coward in a young man, causing some to run off on their children and their spouses. In the popular imagination, however, the option to stick around to provide for children is not much more noble. For many guys, early parenthood has hints of dreams abandoned and potential stifled. Our understanding of fatherhood, is that it is a sustainable complication which is career advancement difficult and quite secondary personal growth. When a child arrives, according to common thinking, you can forget about achieving goals or dreams. You'll be lucky if you can find the time to relax at the end of a day at a thankless job which only support you because you are enough man to put your children in front of yourself - no matter how much makes you their resentment.

Horan-Lunney never seen this way, although, even if some around him and his new wife.

"I've honestly lost a couple of friends in this," he said. "They will never say they objected to being friends with a young father. They would just say that choosing fatherhood was throw my life. "Next page >

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