To gather data for my factual question along the same lines, I’d like to ask Dopers to say how old they were on, on average, when their kids were born.
To participate. please
Make sure you’re done having kids. By making sure, I don’t want you to participate if you (and your spouse, if any) THINK you’re probably done having kids, or WANT to be done having kids, but there’s a chance you could be faced with a surprise pregnancy that might result in an unexpected birth. I guess I’m talking to elderly Dopers here, or near elderly Dopers. OTOH, I’m not talking about a merely mathematical chance you could have another kid: if you’re a 70-y.o. widower who hasn’t gone on a date in a year, yeah, it’s not impossible you’ll find someone to impregnate, and your sperm are still viable, but no, you’re good to vote here. Use your judgment. If it would make the news that you had another kid, you’re eligible.
Please present your data in approximately decimal form. For example, if my only kid was born in early June, and I was born in late April, 20 years and 36 days apart, I’d represent that as “20.1” meaning 20 years and one-tenth of a year.
Natural births only, please. No adoptions, suspected fatherhoods, contested paternities, etc.
In actual fact, I have more than one kid, and on average I’m 35.3 years older than they are. That’s our first data point: slicedalone: 35.3.
43 (May have missed a decimal but it’s pretty close to that, and I don’t have time to make a spreadsheet )
May not count as baby #4 is on the way in under a month. But I can assure the OP we are absolutely 100% done (as a friend, who knows someone with 5 kids said, there is a difference between talking about getting a vasectomy and actually getting one, and we are definitely in the latter camp )
Interesting answers. I was recently chatting online with someone in the US. He is only 5 years older than me, I am 70, yet he has grandkids with professional careers. My granddaughter is 4. So I assumed that most people had started families much younger than I did.
If you give birth to a child at age 20 and give him/her up for adoption, I’ll accept that, but if you’re the parent adopting him/her at age 40, I should count you and that parent both? How does that work? The adopted child is only one person, and I need to make a choice of which parent to count. The parent who actually bears the child seems more logical to me.
I suppose, to increase the size of your data pool, I can add that, for the mother of my 3 children, the answer would be 32.6 because they were the same kids for her. And they had the same birth dates.