Without revealing your age....

[hedda_foil]

390. Many of our parents were very young by today's standards.

People in their generation often had a couple or three kids by the time they were 25. If they were Catholic, the number if kids a couple had by 25 could easily be 5 or 6. So many got married right after high school. If they went to college, the expectation was that the girls be married within a few months of graduation -- if they didn't just drop out of school because they were getting their MRS. sooner. (My mother did that. Two years at Northwestern and married at 20.)

I'm on the invisible tip of the leading edge of the boom ... born between VE and VJ day in 1945. When husbands did war work or trained soldiers at posts in the states, a lot of them got pregnant after D Day in Europe, when the war turned decisively in the allies favor. My dad was 4F because he was allergic to something in the lunch they served the boys who were reporting for the draft. By the time he got to the medical exam, he was in the throes of a horrendous migraine which kept him out of the army. He worked as an engineer on airplane radios and weather balloons instead.

We had huge classes in school -- 40-45 kids per teacher, often in split grades. Of course, as soon as the vets came home, they couldn't build schools fast enough for years.