My opinion, which counts for less than nothing as I am not a parent and never will be, is 40 just seems too old to be a parent, as you’ll be in your 60s when the kid is in the prime of their life. I’d recommend avoiding it just for that reason. I think early 30s is about right.
Having said that, my brother was 40 when he had his first kid, and now has two more. He is currently 46.
My own Dad was relatively late in age when we kids were born, late 30s, but he then died youngish (54), so it’s a poor anecdote to use as any kind of example.
I know far too many awesome (and usually perfectly healthy) people whose parents were of ‘advanced’ age when they were born, to think that there should be rules or even judgement against older parents. Including my father, both the men I have loved, and my youngest cousin - all of whom are exceptionally bright and wonderful people.
If you want to have a baby, have a damn baby. Yes there are a few increased risks after 35 for women, but if your body can conceive and gestate and you have access to modern medical technology, odds are still heavily on your side that you’ll end up with a healthy kid. And there are a lot of ways to enjoy parenting and raise happy, functional kids - the ‘best way’ and the ‘right time’ are largely a matter of personal opinion.
I confess that part of why I am such a health nut is that I might be having kids later in life, if at all (I’m only 27 but I have a long way to go before I could provide a stable home environment for a child) - if I spend my youth continuing to eat nutritiously and stay in top physical shape, I’ll have much less to worry about and many fewer risk factors with pregnancy (as well as in life in general!).
Eleanor of Aquitaine was 44 when she gave birth to the future King John of England. Now, how well that worked out in the long run is hotly debated, but he was healthy enough and had all his fingers and toes, and this was in 1166 and they were all barbarians.
Mostly, I think other people should stop worrying about whether or not, or how, other folks are reproducing.
That said - I don’t think society should encourage women to delay childbearing to the 40’s, but I don’t think it should stand in the way, either. Yes, there are some increased risks but by far the majority of babies born to older mothers are healthy and normal. There are so many more things we should worrying about that have much more likelihood of adverse consequences.
It’s not ideal, but then what is? I think my parents would have been much better parents if they had delayed their child-rearing until they were financially secure and more emotionally mature. I don’t know if they should have waited till 40 for their first kid, but 35 sounds about right.
As more and more parents start having children later, we will see technological advancements that mitigate the health risks and infertility. Perhaps it will become routine to stow one’s gametes away cryogenically as soon as people become financially able to do so. Maybe we will discover a hormone pill that prevents menopause indefinitely.
As far as parental lifespans go, maybe if we were talking about people becoming parents in their 60s this would concern me. But people are living longer and healthier. It used to be that you’d become an enfeebled old person in your 60s. But all the 60-year-olds I see are still doing the damn thing.
The biggest downside is not the age of the parent, but rather having very old or dead grandparents. A 50-year-old or 60-year-old grandparent can be a godsend in a way that a 70- or 80-year-old simply cannot be. And this courses through the generations. If I have a kid in my 40s, chances are my 70-year-old mother is NOT going to want to do a whole lot of babysitting and diaper-changing and heavy-baby carrying. So my kid won’t really have a strong maternal grandmother figure in her/his life and I won’t have as much help as I would have gotten if I started earlier. And because I’m an older parent, my kid’s kids would also be at a disadvantage when it comes to really knowing me. My “fun” Nana days will be waning down once they arrive on the scene–especially if my kid delays parenthood too.
I didn’t have strong grandparental presence in my life, so this doesn’t sadden me too much. But it could be an issue to consider.
monstro, this has been so true for me. My dad has lost most of his hearing, and misses a lot of the silly noises and coos my baby makes. Mom’s joints are too stiff to get in the floor with the crawling baby easily. She does it, but it looks painful and slow. Mom also reminded me to take lots of pictures over Christmas because “She may not remember us, and I want her to have proof that we loved her.” That broke my heart. I do wish I’d had children earlier for specifically this reason.
I know someone who’s youngest daughter had her first child at 45. She was telling me her daughter is always complaining that she never does so-and-so for her kid like she did for her other grandchildren, all born decades earlier. The “so-and-so” can be as simple as carrying her toddler up the stairs.
“It’s not my fault she waited till I was an old lady to have children!”
She laughed when she said this, but I could tell she’d just shared a genuine strain in their relationship. I imagine grandparents, just like parents, really want to be fair and equal in their love and attention. But old age can make this impossible.
One of my mother’s aunts went through 22 yrs of childless marriage, then started menopause at 45. Then she went to her doctor and found out it wasn’t menopause at all; she was in her 2nd trimester. And it was twins. Her husband was in his 50s.
We do now have the ability to freeze unfertilized eggs (which turns out to be alot harder than freezing sperm or embryos) so that’s going to be an option for young women before long. Delaying menopause is a different story. Women are born with a finate amount of eggs, once those are gone they’re gone. We could probally use drugs to counteract most of the symptons of menopause, maybe even “trick” the body so she still has periods (I’m not really sure why a woman would want to preserve that), but she still won’t be fertile. We’d either need to find a way to produce eggs in a lab, replace the genetic material in a donor egg, or genetically reengineer the female reproductive system so women keep producing eggs throughout her life like men to with sperm.
My grandfather was born in 1917*, and my mom was born in 1944**. I was born in 1983, and the significant age difference between me and my brothers*** meant that I had very little exposure to my grandparents (with the exception of my maternal grandfather-- none of the others lived past the mid-1980s) in comparison to them. I didn’t really get the “grandparent experience” much as a kid, and I was a teenager (~14 or so) when my mom went through menopause. She died at the age of 63, and, since I was 25 at the time and having kids was the last thing on my mind, I have no idea what her pregnancy experiences were like. I didn’t think to ask about it because I assumed she’d be around if I decided I wanted kids. My dad is a year older (he’s 69 now) and I’m seeing that he’s getting mentally old faster than I’m comfortable with. I’m just barely in the financially stable period of my life, and I cannot imagine how many more years it’ll be before my dad gets to need to not live on his own anymore. He’s physically still reasonably active, but I’m not sure whether it’s going to be a decade or less before we have to take into consideration the idea of inviting him to live with us to make sure he’s okay. (Let’s say that I have to financially support another adult person in two years. That’s not going to happen easily or at all without some major changes in my income.) I’m not sure that having kids now at almost 30 would be a great idea, as I have no real support system and we’re not financially anywhere close to being able to afford kids [even if we wanted them].
*I don’t know what year my grandmother was born, but she was close in age to my grandfather. This makes her second birth at ~25.
*My mother was 38 when I was born. Eldest brother is ~15 years older than me, whereas middle brother is 10 years older than me.
Based on my experience, I wouldn’t recommend having kids after 40. Yes, being 60 is a lot easier now than it was 10 years ago for many folks, but even with the idea that your kids are going to make you grandparents when they’re in their mid-20s, you’re still going to have issues being an active grandparent. Depending upon how late you start, you may have issues being an active parent when your kid hits puberty; that’s got to be rough on parent and child alike, as there are certain aspects of the relationship that get strained due to the parent not being able to participate in some activities.
****This one puzzles me. If we’re encouraging people to become parents later and later, then why do we expect that their kids are not going to do the same thing?
I’ve had the opposite experience. Last year, my sister and I had grandbaby number eleven and number twelve, respectively. Our parents turned 65 that year. They are a thousand times more involved with our children than they were with the first ten, simply because now they are retired. They always lived in different cities from their grandkids, and could, at best, visit briefly. Now, they have time and flexibility. They were able to move to where me and my sister and a lot of our extended family live, and they babysit. They see the little, everyday stuff. That never would have happened while they were working, even if they had lived here: they worked all the damn time, and even on weekends, it’s a much bigger deal to ask someone to give up a big chunk of their Saturday when they have a demanding job.
Now, will they be as involved when the kids are in high school? Probably not. But they have the time now to establish some sort of relationship when the kids are small, and there’s the hope of continuing it as they age. Whereas with the older grandkids, I think the ship has sailed: they aren’t going to grow close, as older kids, to their grandparents that weren’t around in their youth.
Aren’t grandparents a new concept? That most families in the past had such short life spans that being a grandparent was nearly nonexistent.
There is another reason for delayed motherhood. Some are holding out for true love a partner to help raise their kids with. I have plenty of friends and coworkers who didn’t hold out and said it won’t get any better than this and married whoever they were with in order to start a family. OR they gave up and settled on a sperm donor, that is the cheap way, some random hookup/boyfriend to knock them up. My coworker did this way when she was 32 and unmarried and settled for for that. Her son is adorable, but consequences was a nonexistent father with a lousy family background. The baby daddy’s parents/grandparents are out of the picture so she is doing it on her own.
I have a friend who came from a strict background and her family would never have accepted her being a single mom (she wanted a baby more than a husband)…she settled on getting married to an adequate guy, but secretly confided that she’ll split up when their baby gets older.
Well, how recently are you talking about? Average lifespan includes all those people who don’t make it to the age of five, so it skews the results pretty thoroughly. The mortality rate for infants, young children and women giving birth has gone down significantly, which contributes to the increased lifespan. If you take into account that, historically, people were having children in their teens and twenties, grandparents existed fairly commonly, even if only for the early years. Additionally, extended families are historically pretty damned common; what’s uncommon are nuclear families that don’t have aunts, uncles and grandparents to reinforce a support structure for children.
No, they aren’t new. What’s new is the isolated nuclear family, where kids don’t know grandparents, aunts, and uncles because they’re halfway across the country.
My yoga instructor is a grandmother in her forties. If you think about it, this would have been fairly common back in the day when women started having babies in their late teens, early 20s. Now it’s a thing of wonder.
True. My best friend growing up was a grandfather at 36 and his wife was at 35. That is true white trash material now and although the title isn’t undeserved in general, they are still quite wealthy and happy with healthy great-grandparents who were still in their 50’s at the time. It is a great source of support.
My mother had me when she was 21 and my grandparents were in their 40’s at the time. For a first grandchild, it was ideal and I had plenty of people to help take care of me. Even most of my great-grandparents were alive as well and I knew them closely. I used to stay with my great-grandmother every day before and after junior high because she lived right next to the school. It was great that I had three generations of family to fall back on.
It sucks being an older parent especially when you live as far away from your family as I do. I didn’t even start that late. The first was born when I was 29 and the younger when I was 33 but I think even that is pushing it. There is absolutely nobody but you that can take care any problems that come up and the success of that depends on extreme pre-planning as well as luck. It is much better to have an extended family in place to help with things and that is strongly associated with age. I don’t think it is to anyone’s benefit in favor of other goals like career advancement or personal freedom of the parents.
