One tangential statistic which I found interesting - the average marriage age for British women in 1970 was 22! I have done some limited and not terribly systematic research of my own on this and found a fairly but not universally consistent picture of the average marriage age for most women being mid to late twenties (and men a couple of years older) in Europe since the medieval period, so that's a pretty colossal and temporary drop. Of course it was a declaration of independence in many cases. Edited to add: see comments for actual statistics, which tell a different story.
I found myself sympathetic to, but not certain about, Cunningham's conclusions: that childhood itself is becoming eroded as a concept in today's Britain, where overstretched parents do not have the social resources available to them that