The New Republic has a fantastic article by Judith Shulevitz about the greying of American parents. Well-educated, white women in the Northeast (hey, that's me!) are much more likely to put off having childbirth until after aged 30 than other groups and over time, and a significant number of women put off stroller pushing until their 40's.
What does it all mean? Well, children from older dads are more likely to have an autistic spectrum disorder. We have no idea of the long term health risks of infertility treatments. There's the embarrassment of being confused as the grandmother as your child's wedding.
I had Jonah when I was 34 and Ian when I was 37. Before that, we were too poor and too busy working towards the PhDs to consider having kids. And none of our friends were doing it. We were all working hard and drinking until wee hours of the night and we had no interest in leaving the urban tribe.
We could have started earlier. I met Steve when I was 30, and we almost instantly knew that we were going to get married. We could have started our family at 31, instead of 34, and then not paused for three years between kids. Truthfully, I wish we had more kids. I really like the ones that we made, and I think we could have made another good one or two. But it was not in the cards for us. It is partially because of stupid career decisions and lifestyle choices that don't matter to me anymore.
Alison Benedikt in Slate has similar regrets.
What can be done? Shulevitz isn't sure about a specific policy, but ends with this thought:
It wonāt be easy to make the world more baby-friendly, but if we were to try, weād have to restructure the professions so that the most intensely competitive stage of a career doesnāt occur right at the moment when couples should be lavishing attention on infants. Weād have to stop thinking of work-life balance as a womenās problem, and reframe it as a basic human right. Changes like these are going to be a long time coming, but I canāt help hoping they happen before my children confront the Hobsonās choices that made me wait so long to have them.
Apt. 11d 
I think this is just another example of things swinging both ways.
In the Boston area, having 2 kids before 35 is considered ‘young’ since there are so many professionals/academics. Most of my kids’ friends have larger houses, more toys, nicer clothes. Also, being a postdoc with 2 kids is hard. So I often wonder what it would have been like to wait.
However, I was living in Quebec, where daycare, health care and gov’t subsidies (we were PhD students) made having kids more affordable than travelling to fancy places like my late-20s peers were doing. In other words, when work life balance is a priority for society, its easier to decide to have kids.
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I’m always frustrated by articles (like both of these) that compare to a magical model that either didn’t exist or was very short term. Take the angst about life expectancy and age your children will be when you might die — it’s not grounded in reasonable statistics.
The life expectancy for women age 20 has gone up 10 years since 1940. So having children 10 years later doesn’t really change our time with them (mind you, I’m ignoring some info here, so this isn’t a well researched statistic). But, the point is that we are not conducting some grant new experiment that is different from all the other experiments humanity has conducted on children and child-raising. We’re an evolving society and always have been.
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I had my kids at 35 and 38, even though I married their father at 23. I don’t regret for a minute those carefree years as a young married couple who had no responsibilities but ourselves.
Having children was life-disrupting for me. I suddenly had responsibility for dependent people, something I’d never experienced before. It was big, and changed the way every moment of my life was lived. I absolutely love my life now and the warm fuzzies I get from my children. But, once I had them, the person I was , the person who got to make decisions without worrying about people I was responsible for (whether it was the next drink at the bar in New Orleans or the support of a political candidate) was gone.
And, our delayed child-bearing offered us much greater support in child-raising, in stability, income, and family support. I can’t imagine external resources that would have helped more (and, will admit, selfishly, to liking that I am not old compared to my children’s friend’s parents, even though I got to make the choices I wanted when I was young).
(of course, I had no issues with infertility, and I can’t know yet what our health lives will be going into the future).
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I think the people who decry delayed parenting have an agenda (have kids now to save the social welfare state because the demographics aren’t working!) and discount how much personal growth/maturity add to parenting. However, I had two children before I was 30 and I am glad to be 51 with grown kids and even grandchildren (ages 5 and 3). Of course I am not a college graduate and am working class/lower middle income class.
In favor of having children while younger is the value of grandparents to the next generations. I can pick up some of the slack of raising my grandkids because I’m young enough and healthy enough to care for them (although I’m also still working so less available). My grandkids know me and have the loving support of more than just their parents, and I am likely to see great-grandchildren (after all, I knew two of my great grandmothers–born in the 1890s–and one great grandfather).
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Count me as someone who thinks this is not that big of a deal. Women have always had children at 33 and 35 and 38 it’s just that they started at a much younger age and had far more children.
It’s such a select group of people-like you said, educated, urban, northeasteners-that is really delaying having kids that I don’t feel like their experiences say much about general trends. She says flat out in the article that the average man is 27 to 28 when his first child is born then she goes on to spin a tale about the repercussions of delayed childbirth based on her own experience.
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Kai said:
“In favor of having children while younger is the value of grandparents to the next generations.”
I was born when my grandma was exactly 50 (I’m the oldest of her 9 grandchildren) and we definitely all benefited from having younger, energetic grandparents.
On the other hand, you lose a lot of those benefits with high mobility and working grandmas (especially when you’ve got both in play). We live thousands of miles from all of the grandparents and it’s quite a banner year when any of them pays a short visit here. We take our kids to visit their grandparents every year or two and my in-laws have funded a lot of therapy for our oldest over the years (which is of course largely possible because of grandma being very employed), but as far as day-to-day interaction and support, forget about it.
bj said:
“I’m always frustrated by articles (like both of these) that compare to a magical model that either didn’t exist or was very short term.”
Yes, like in the real good old days, you’d likely have kids when you were 20ish, 30ish and 40ish. It wouldn’t be either/or (unless you married unfashionably late, like poor Charlotte Bronte).
I’ve had the experiment of having my first at 27, my second at 29 and my third at 37. For the first two, I was in DC, which made me a very young mommy. Nowadays, when I’m out and about with my new baby here in Texas, I’m an older mom.
Which is better? Socially and economically speaking, it’s nice to be an older mom. I know a lot of people, the big kids can do all sorts of things for themselves (and me!), we have ample supplies of baby stuff, I was able to buy a ridiculous $400 stroller, and we’re going to have a house soon. Medically speaking, it was less than ideal. It’s hard to say whether being older or being multiparous was more to blame, but nothing worked as well as it did in my 20s. I had a short bedrest and then lots of physical restrictions for my second trimester and then gestational diabetes for my third trimester. I also noticed that aches and pains were a lot more pronounced postpartum this last time.
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I had my kids at 28, 30 and 34, but if I’d started younger (I could have– I met my husband when we were 19), I would have had one more kid. So regardless of whether it would have been “better” for me to start earlier or later, the truth remains that I had no energy to have a 4th in my late 30s.
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Had my first at 26, 2nd & 3rd came when I was 30. Now at 38 – I have absolutely no interest whatsoever to revisit that “baby time” and it is inconceivable to me that many at my age are just starting (but that probably has more to do with my energy levels relative to other people’s). At the same time, if we hadn’t dealt with secondary infertility – we very well may have had a 4th. As we look towards secondary education costs, though, I really cannot grieve not having 4 tuition payments to take care of.
I will say that at this point, my husband (same age as I) and I delightedly look forward to the day that the last child will be off to college, and we will (hopefully) be very young 48 year olds! I happily anticipate having an empty nest and being able to make more selfish choices as a duo, rather than a quintet. I guess some of us chose to have that time early in life, and some of us deferred it to later. š
At the same time, I will acknowledge our choices were made easier because we were able to raise our family with the “traditional” set up of one parent at home, and one parent in the workforce in large part because my husband makes a very good income. I cannot imagine having 3 babies within a span of 4 years and both parents working outside the home. I know some people do it (and hats off to them!) but whoa, what a ton of work.
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How “new” are old parents? Age of menopause hasn’t been changing, so its not like giving birth in the late 30s and early 40s is a new trend. In Victorian England, the average age for last child was 39. If autism is linked to older parents, does it matter if it’s the parents’ first or eighth kid? I doubt it. My great-great-grandmother had her last kid at 51. My one great-grandmother had ten kids, starting at 26. She had twins at age 45. My mother’s mother had her first kid at 28 and her last at 40. Her own father was 50 when she was born and her mother was 40, and she wasn’t even the youngest.
Also, marriage in the late teens or early 20s is a 20th century anomaly in the West, not the historical norm. According to wikipedia and googling (and recollection of an article on JSTOR on marriage age in 19th century N. Europe), average age of marriage in Western Europe has ranged from a low of early 20s for women to a high of early 30s, plunging only in the 19th and 20th centuries, and only in some locations. From my memory of the article, in 19th century Norway women on average married around age 26-27 and men at around 30, and I think it was even higher in the Netherlands (around 28 for women, early 30s for men).
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“If autism is linked to older parents, does it matter if it’s the parents’ first or eighth kid? I doubt it.”
Interestingly, it does matter. I don’t have a reference right now, but while advancing paternal age is bad, that’s counterbalanced by birth order. 3rd and 4th children are somewhat protected by their position in the family–I expect you get a richer family social life with a larger family.
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“We have no idea of the long term health risks of infertility treatments.”
Yes – I suspect IF treatments were a contributing factor to my friend’s triple-negative breast cancer diagnosis at age 35. No one ever talks about this risk.
Knowing what I know now about my health situation, I’m glad I had my kids “early” for my peer group, at 31 and 33. I’m deeply grateful to have conceived immediately both times, and to have healthy kids today. I developed high blood pressure and put on a ton of weight when my metabolism screeched to a halt pretty much out of nowhere at age 35.5. The thought of having to go through a pregnancy now at 37 is pretty terrifying. Thank you, DH’s urologist, for the vasectomy he has coming up next week.
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My mom had me (first born) when she was 38 — 45 years ago. She married when she was in her thirties and then my parents waited a few years until deciding to have a family. I have a younger brother.
A couple of thoughts on having older parents:
1. At the time, my mom was the oldest mom around. Old enough to be better friends with my best friend’s grandmother than her parents. I’m sure this has changed today — for the better.
2. My parents were immigrants. There were no grandparents or relatives to help out. I suspect this may have pushed them to wait. They needed to ensure they were secure enough to raise a child.
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Hmm, my wife was 46 when our only daughter was born. (Compare to that, ye women, if you can!) Obviously, we couldn’t have any more. But I wish we had met when she was younger–although these sorts of counterfactuals don’t really make sense–and had more children. But only one or two, because we couldn’t afford more than that, unless we moved out of the City.
I agree with the others: lack of grandparent support had been a negative, but being richer than most twenty-somethings has been a positive, etc.
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“From my memory of the article, in 19th century Norway women on average married around age 26-27 and men at around 30, and I think it was even higher in the Netherlands (around 28 for women, early 30s for men).”
There was a major exodus from Scandinavia in the late 19th century. It must have been a tough place to live (think about what material conditions would have to be to make Minnesota look like the promised land).
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“Yes – I suspect IF treatments were a contributing factor to my friend’s triple-negative breast cancer diagnosis at age 35. No one ever talks about this risk.”
Same with my sister’s estrogen-positive BC diagnosis. And she never got pregnant after the IVF, either. š¦ (She has one daughter.)
Laura’s and my lives track freakishly similar except I’m a year younger; our kids were born within weeks of each other (wait, Ian might be about 2-3 months older than my youngest). My husband and I were married 7 years before we had kids. My husband was resistant to the idea, but I talked him into it. We lived for 5.5 glorious childless years in Brooklyn. My parents were 21 when they had me, and my mom had 4 kids by age 31. I think my sisters and I were all 30 or older when we had our kids.
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WSJ had an article yest about current rates of complications, difficult and dangerous deliveries, which they tie to older and obese mothers. As an older dad, I have been a parasite on younger and sportier guys who led my kids’ sport teams, and we hope we can keep going to help and be there for them into their 30s.
It would have been better to have done it earlier. We’re glad to have done it, love the kids, and there are certainly things we have been able to do both before and with which might not have worked out for younger parents, but younger would have been better.
In my oldest’s kindergarten classroom, there were 23 kids, and the teacher told my she had ten onlies, ten from families with two, and my guy was one of only three from a family of three or more. A lot of this is because of arithmetic: you graduate college, take a terminal master’s, get a job, save a downpayment and make some dent in your debts and if you are fortunate find love and – bang! you are 37 and your breeding years are closing fast.
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I’m 48 and in four years I will be an empty nester. I had my kids at 31, 32 and 34. I’m really, really, really glad I didn’t wait until I was 38 or so — although it would have been better for my career. At 52 I will still be young enough to relocate and take a promotion if I want to, as well as to go abroad and teach somewhere cool for a sabbatical. My husband and I both have siblings who had kids in their 40’s and it’s clear that it is rougher on them than it was on us.
In addition, my parents are starting to wind down that road where they will need lots of caretaking, and two of my three will soon be driving themselves to their events, freeing me up to help out. In contrast, my brother still has a kindergartener so they can’t really even go see my parents without planning for things like babysitters when mom’s in the hospital, etc. I’m stunned by the way in which my parents went overnight from healthy to less healthy, and I don’t think anything really prepares you for that. I have benefitted from the times when my moms was in good health and could do things like stay with our kids for a week while my husband and I went to Europe. That will not be happening for my brother’s family.
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I don’t see this as a problem. The planet is already overburdened with too many humans. Anything that results in fewer, but better, humans is a net positive for us all.
Our approaches for caring for the elderly in the short term will need some tweaking, that’s true, if there are tons of elderly and fewer young people. Perhaps *that* is the problem we should be solving, as opposed to bemoaning delayed parenthood.
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I had my two kids while tenure-track: at another place that would have been crazy but here I was nurtured. I’m glad we didn’t have kids later in life than my early thirties: I feel creaky enough now that they’re in their last years of high school.
Of course, the long line of history tells us that in, for example, seventeenth century Britain, the average age of marriage was in the late twenties. Prospective brides and grooms didn’t have ‘big careers’ but they both often had to save up for setting up their households. That said, there were a lot of babies christened five months or so after a marriage!
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I don’t think there’s any known link between IF treatments and breast cancer right now (in fact, there’s a little tidbit that says that IF treatments, and a failure to get pregnant may actually result in slightly lower risk than women who haven’t received treatment at all — though I wouldn’t go crazy with that tidbit).
On the other hand, Amy’s report, of pregnancy being harder on a woman’s body at 37 than 27, because of diabetes, high blood pressure, . . . . is well documented. So health risks to women definitely increase with age.
It’s interesting to read the different reports and note how personal a decision children are, and, I think, to see how strongly people of our ilk (i.e. women who really did, for the most part, decide exactly when they were going to have children) are about the children we had and how they fit into our lives. I’m guessing that the biological impulse to love your children is pretty strong and is rarely going to cause someone to regret a choice they made to have the child. No one seems to regret the children they had (or even when they had them) in these comments. but, some people regret not having all the children they might have had.
What public policy could change decision making on such a personal issue? I even had friends who had children, when I was in my 20’s. Nothing made me want to follow in their footsteps (though at least one of them tried pretty hard to convince me). I have seen an increase in people choosing to have children, as grad students and post-docs over the past 20 years or so. I suspect that change is occurring because people are recognizing that you do have to make the decision to have children if they are important to you and that there’s no perfect time.
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I’m the youngest of four and an “oops” baby, born in 1973. My siblings were 12, 15, and 17 when I was born, and my parents were 36 (mom) and 44 (dad). My parents were regularly mistaken for my grandparents. I was often lonely as a kid, and I definitely sensed that my parents were tired of raising children; my mother in particular seemed (and still seems) much older than her actual years. I wouldn’t recommend the way I grew up to anyone.
I had my first child at 30, three weeks after I passed by PhD candidacy exams. When I finished my PhD, she was three. I had my son exactly a week after my 35th birthday, during my second year on the tenure track. I would have liked to have had a third child, but I wasn’t willing to get pregnant again after 35 for many reasons, including most of the ones shared here. So, we’re done. We’ve taken permanent measures to prevent pregnancy.
I always swore that if I had kids, I would be a young mother, because I didn’t want my kids going through what I went through. Things didn’t work out that way, though. I married young (22), but I didn’t want kids until I entered my late 20s, at which point I was in grad school and had to think about timing. I no longer worry about my age, though; I’ve realized I am not the type of mother I had.
I will say that at M’s old school, I was always one of the oldest moms in the room; in fact, at 39 I am around the same age as the grandma of the girl who bullied her so badly. Given the culture and socio-economics of Fort Wayne, people who were born and grew up here often start having kids between the ages of 18 and 22. My students bear this out, too.
At her new school, filled with transplants to Fort Wayne, I do not look older than any of her classmates’ moms. I know several of them are significantly older than me; I know some are younger, but I don’t look older than them. The socio-economics of this school are more in line with what you describe in your post.
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bj, my sister remembers that when she got her hormone shots for whatever infertility treatment she had, she was warned of an elevated risk for BC. We don’t have BC in our family history, so we were all thrown for a loop when she got diagnosed. I do think it’s interesting that my dad had a hormone-responsive cancer as well.
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“I have seen an increase in people choosing to have children, as grad students and post-docs over the past 20 years or so.”
On the other hand, those people often aren’t that young, either. My pregnancy buddy is only about a year younger than me and she’s a grad wife (they currently have a 2-year-old and a baby). She had a previous life as a big city lawyer with infertility problems, but was finally able to conceive after leaving that life for Texas. We know at least one other graduate couple who were infertile but were able to have a baby here. Within the program, it’s not uncommon to have two kids and three is not unheard of, and a lot of these are 30-somethings. (By the time they have three, it’s time to get them a job!!!) My pregnancy buddy’s family of four is pretty tightly squeezed into their very small two-bedroom graduate housing, but it’s $500 a month and very close to campus, which has its attractions. There are worse places to have little kids. We also have a female graduate student who finds herself expecting twins this spring. That will be challenging, but I don’t think she’s that much younger than I am–she’s definitely at least 30-something.
My husband and I were on a rather different schedule–he finished his degree and got his first tenure track job in DC at 28 and our first baby was born the following year. As far as disposable income is concerned, it was probably not that far off from the graduate student lifestyle here in Texas (although thanks to EZ credit, I didn’t realize how straitened our means were at the time).
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I forgot to mention that there’s a huge baby boom going on in my husband’s department and it’s not just grad wives. A female grad student just had a baby, there’s another female grad student due in January and then there are twins due in the late spring. It’s socially a tight-knit group, and I think there is a tipping point where it’s easier and more fun to have a baby at the same time when your peers are doing it.
Meanwhile, the department scrambles to make arrangements to deal with the practical repercussions (visa issues and work reductions) of all of these pregnant and new mom grad students.
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Our oldest child just turned 21, our youngest is 10. We have two more in between. I’m the same age as most of the first threes friends’ moms. I’m the oldest of the parents of the last one though. They’re all just turning 40 and I’ll be 50 next year. B is 61, so he’s older than all the kids’ friends’ parents. Interestingly, he’s only been mistaken as a grandfather once.
My parents are early 70’s. My dad has been lots of help with my kids since his retirement. He’s watched them while we were on vacation, and done some carpooling for us. B’s parents are long gone and never even met their grandkids. It’s sad for my kids to not have that relationship I think.
If I had it to do over, all my kids would’ve been born closer together. I’m tired of parenting in so many ways and ready to move on to the next phase of my life that doesn’t involve homework and saying “clean your room” on a daily basis.
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@bj and Wendy – True, while there is currently no known link between IF treatments and BC, certainly there are some anecdotal beliefs being shared by oncology docs out there who are “seeing BC cases like these all the time after IF treatments.” It wouldn’t surprise me at all if in the next few years we do find an evidence-based link between IF treatments and BC in women<40 with no family BC history, who are never able to conceive. My friend's oncologist surmised the "unexplained infertility" my friend experienced from age 33-35 may have been caused by the presence of medically-undetectable cancer cells in her body, and was hastened but not per se caused by the IF treatments she received.
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