I think my biological clock is ticking.

I’m a male, 22 years old. Every time I see a friend or a stranger that has a kid it makes me want to have a child. It is sort of a weird feeling because I didn’t feel this way at all a year or two ago. I’ve read older males who have children typically have more kids with birth defects and such. If I got a girl pregnant 3 years ago I would have wanted her to get an abortion, if it happened now though I would want her to definitely keep it.

Ummm, dude … talk to your parents. NOW.

Yeah, it’s ticking, and it’ll ring in about sixty years. You have tons of time.

Go hang out near children of all ages (not in a creepy way) and see how you react around screaming, shouting, joy, anger, crying, jealousy and all the intensity of all ages. Now remember you can’t take a break from it, for say, forever, once you have your own.

Be sure your prepared financially, as raising children under financial duress is no fun for everybody involved.

Listen, kids are great, got three myself; one stepson as close as flesh and blood, my well planned son and an ‘oops’ daughter just 15 months behind my son. These kids are the best thrill ride of my life.

FWIW I suggest you go adventure for awhile so you have some good stories to tell the kids while they are growing up - early to mid thirties is a great time to start your part of the circle of life.

Biggest part of ‘no regrets’ is not messin up in the first place…

Forgive the play on words, but it isn’t your clock that ticking, it’s your brain not clicking. You’ve got plenty of time. Enjoy it.

[Miroku]Pool, will you bear my children?[/Miroku]

I presume, o you fresh faced 22 year old, that you understand that by “older” you mean much, much older. Yes, paternal age over 40 is a risk factor in failure to conceive (due, they speculate, to increased wear and tear on the body), but even beyond that, men are still fertile for a long, long time.

My little brother, who’s now 27 and nearly 6 feet tall, has been a bit ga-ga over babies his whole life. He’s torn, though – having a baby (at least in my family) generally means the whole marriage thing, which means he’d have to find a tolerable woman and hitch up with her, and then not leave her when she gets inconvenient.

Fortunately, we now have two little nieces to spoil, so I think his clock has quieted down.

Maybe you just have to poop?

I think it’s sweet that a man can openly admit that he, too, has a clock.
I’ll never forget when I realized my (now) husband had one. We were engaged at the time, and on a camping trip with my extended family. I was braiding the hair of a little cousin, about 3yrs old. The other women sitting around the fire pointed out the look on my fiance’s face as he watched me with the little girl - it was pure sappy longing.
I’m a sucker for a guy who is a sucker for little kids.

But we still waited another six years to have our own!
Please, for the sake of your social life, enjoy the lack of being responsible for a helpless someone 24/7 a little longer.

I suggest borrowing one, or preferably two, of those children from your friends for an extended weekend alone with Uncle Pool. It’ll give your friends a break, which they’ll love, and you’ll get to test out just how serious your biological clock is without actually creating another human being.

Kids for a day are easy. Kids overnight and all the next day and another night and another day…well, that starts to give you a little tiny taste of parenthood. The hard part about parenting isn’t each individual moment. Most of those moments are easy. The hard part is that it Just. Never. Stops.

So either you’ll be exhausted and overwhelmed and you’ll realize it’s a good idea to wait, OR you’ll love every moment of it and be terribly happy and you can get on with finding a mate who also wants kids. Either way, you’ll have a better sense of what you can handle right now.

I’ve never heard that older men create children with birth defects. Women, sure…but not men. They can reproduce safely their entire lives.

Fightin’ dat ignorance.

Wow. Thanks for the link! I guess Larry King, Imus, Dave Letterman and the rest were runnin’ with scissors.

[QUOTE=Solfy]
I think it’s sweet that a man can openly admit that he, too, has a clock.
/QUOTE]

Me, too! But yeah, borrow a kid for the weekend and you may just be aching for a vasectomy, instead.

I’m not planning on actually having any kids for a couple of years. I just think its weird that the urge is there, but it wasn’t just a couple years ago.

I was oddly attracted to young mothers in my early to mid twenties. A trick of the hormones I suspect. At 33 that attraction is gone and the dob is more than enough to convince me children would drive me insane.

My girlfriend teases me endlessly because I get gushy whenever I see little kids. Like ridiculously (I just wanna squeeze 'em! They are so cute!)

She is hoping (I’[m kind of hoping too) that visiting my nieces this weekend will help cure me.

I know the recent studies show that the risk of genetic disorders goes up, but isn’t the risk still in the low numbers?

In a word, yes.

Here’s a good general article about it on WebMD

And here’s an abstract of a Canadian study, which gives the actual risk (indeed very small, but does increase – link):