Do you want to have children? Have you ever thought about when you might become a parent? Will it be in the next few years or do you plan to wait until you are much older? You may be surprised to learn that globally, one in five girls have given birth by the age of 18. (The age of first-time fathers is not nearly so well recorded.)
As geographers, it is important for us to understand that these young mothers are not distributed randomly around the world. Instead, as Figure 1 shows, there is a spatial pattern. To generalise, in developed countries such as France and Australia, first-time mothers tend to be in their late twenties. In contrast, women in less developed countries such as Ethiopia and India often have their first child at a much younger age. Looking at two very different countries, the UK and Niger, will help to explain this pattern.
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