And the economic situation of our parents is the yardstick we all use for assessing our own capability of providing for an adequate upbringing. A mailman's son

And the economic situation of our parents is the yardstick we all use for assessing our own capability of providing for an adequate upbringing. A mailman's son will likely feel more at ease starting a family when he is a mailman himself than a lawyers's son when his father was a partner in a successful firm while he himself is only on a lowly salaried career (yet far above that mailman). Sorry for the gender stereotypes, but they share too much with those mechanisms to be cut out. To make things worse, that yardstick is based on us seeing later stages of our parents' careers, while we apply it to. In times of widespread growth this does not make much difference, but in times of stagnation or worse it can be crushing. A part of the puzzle the article is marveling at might be current teens not feeling very much in a pipeline towards house and kids.