This shocked both of us, frankly. We were aware of what the actuarial tables will tell you regarding birth defect rates related to maternal age, but hearing the term geriatric in your mid-thirties is quite shocking. I'm ignorant of any data around paternal age and sperm count (assume it goes down...no idea the rate), but the docs do tend to focus on maternal age quite a bit regarding possible defects and fertility.
Nonetheless we were able to conceive in our late 30s without help or any trouble. Our baby is super healthy. Apparently we lucked out.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2729989/
https://www.nct.org.uk/pregnancy/tests-scans-and-antenatal-c...
Seriously, people are just lazy.
Calling the second half of that geriatric is completely appropriate because you’re dealing with significant age related declines.
This used to be after 30 not that long ago around here
Same here, without 'trying' either (as in, we were not actively trying to get pregnant). It was surprising for us to hear the term "geriatric pregnancy" as well, and the ob/gyn seemed to utter out loud a lot of the worst assumptions about what could happen in the pregnancy. She also seemed somewhat surprised and judgmental that our baby wasn't conceived using IVF, which was a bit off-putting but she was otherwise a great doctor.
Worst thing that happened during the pregnancy was some sort of bladder issue caused by the baby being seated in her mom's pelvic floor or something. Not really a complication for the fetus, just for her mom being unable to pee without a catheter. I suspect this was more of an mechanical/anatomical effect that would have occurred regardless of age, but I wouldn't know. The baby also had a bit of an elevated respiratory rate when born, but she's fine now.
That said, my impression of the whole process was that this plays out quite differently for everyone. Ours was surprisingly easy, especially the labor part. I'm left wondering how well they've controlled for factors like the physical fitness of the mother (and father, perhaps), any genetic factors, etc. when trying to figure out how likely fertility issues, birth defects, or other problems occur based on age of the parents. Is there not also a generally higher correlation to poorer physical health as people age?
People need to get a grip on their mortality, man.
- both parents work, you pay for childcare
- one parent drops out of the workforce, takes care of children at home
neither of these is cheap. Decades ago it was realistic for one parent's salary to cover the whole family but these days salary stagnation and increased costs of e.g. housing makes it much more difficult.
This is how civilization propagates. The idea that only the wealthiest can afford to have kids by living in pure isolation and hiring teams of nannies and specialists is contradicted by the practice of opening one's eyes, looking around, and observing much poorer people having kids just fine.
But it requires making sacrifices. Those societies in which few are willing to make the sacrifices necessary die out, and healthier societies take their place.
Yes it is, because those friends and relatives also have to work in order to afford housing, healthcare, etc... grandparents that are happily retired, living off their savings and happy to donate their time is not close to a reality for many people.
> observing much poorer people having kids just fine
Define "just fine". I'm responding to the OP saying that having kids is "not expensive". It is. The fact that people make do, struggle and get by does not alter that fact, it just means they're doing it anyway. 1 in 6 children in the US lives in a food insecure home, that's not particularly "fine".
> Those societies in which few are willing to make the sacrifices necessary die out, and healthier societies take their place.
O...kay? I'm not sure a perspective that's this disconnected from personal lives is all that helpful. "Yes, raising a child in America in 2022 is difficult but don't worry, society will die and a new one will rise"... what's my reaction supposed to be there?
I think the comment means is that you can't have the cake and eat it too. Whether or not you want to make sacrifices in order to have kids, those choices will have consequences. Especially when sufficient number of people are doing it at the same time. The claim seems to be that the societies which prioritize sacrifices in order to raise children will outlives the ones that choose otherwise. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Who knows.
I rather think it does. If Jane Doe can make do for her 3 children at 21 year old on a $15k/year, what right do you ($100k+) have to say that children are expensive.
But sure, if we wish to create a fictional story about a 21 year old raising 3 children on $15k a year I guess we can refute anything.
Part of having kids is wanting your kids to have a life that's as good as, or better, than your current life. You want to give them all of the possible opportunities they can have in addition to instilling them with the values you deem important.
When I was in a position to potentially have a family, I realized that despite my good-on-paper job, my partner and I would not be able to afford any semblance of a good life if we stayed where we were living, and if we moved, I would never be able to see my family - all I would do is work and commute. I had to say no and it led to the dissolution of our relationship.
I don't have family around me, I don't have the option of having family around me, and it makes me angry that you say that I just need to "open my eyes" and see how the poor people do it.
Take a deep breath and reflect on what you said, please.
Homes are much larger now than in 1955. Cars are being purchased with far more (expensive) features, and they are driven for fewer miles before being "upgraded". We eat out much more. Even when we eat in, we eat more luxurious meals. We buy Frappuccinos daily, we buy clothing much more frequently, we impulse shop significantly more, we utilize medical services much more frequently, we take far more, and more luxurious vacations, we rack up ludicrous levels of student debt for degrees that have no hope of servicing said debt, etc, etc, etc.
We are wealthier today than at any point in human history. The myth that all homes must be two-income is predicated on the outrageous lifestyles we choose, NOT due to anything inherent in "society" or "the economy".
Our insane consumerist appetite is what's preventing one household member from staying home, nothing else.
- frankly fraps, daily, are a magnitude of order smaller than childcare. You could deprive yourself of a frap every day for literally years, and you still couldn't afford even 6 mo of daycare.
- we need to buy clothing more frequently because our clothing quality is shit, and the good clothing quality has increased in expense
- if you think adult humans consume medical services too often you're in for a fucking shock of your life when it comes to babies, which being pregnant is a consumption of medical services
- even small homes are much less affordable than in 1955 because the price of land has drastically increased compared to 1955
- student debt is taken on because we know for a fact that college graduates statistically outearn people without college degrees, outliers aside, and the cost of schooling has ballooned for a variety of reasons, one of which is that the previous generation had voted to withdraw funding for schooling
One household member staying home is also supremely dangerous for that one household member at home, which wasn't a problem in 1955 raping your wife was legal and women couldn't even own fucking bank accounts so it wasn't like women had great options besides staying home! If staying home was so good how come women immediately got the fuck out of the house as soon as it was available to them?
Homes are not larger necessarily because of our "insane consumerist appetite." They are larger because:
1. Housing is an investment vehicle 2. Housing valuations are primarily driven by SQFT/SQM (when you rule out location) 3. The baseline costs of building (permits, utility connections, etc) are not driven by size and make up a huge % of the cost to build. 4. Zoning laws prohibit smaller builds and multi-family in many areas.
> We are wealthier today than at any point in human history.
Wealth disparity is also higher today than since records were started. You can't cite overall wealth without factoring that in.
My neighbourhood has a church which holds a weekly food bank, giving out a bag of food to anyone that needs one. The line goes far down the street every week. Do these people have "outrageous" lifestyles? Do you think they take luxurious vacations and sip frappuchinos? Not to mention:
> Homes are much larger now than in 1955.
Okay, how about... affordability? If you're going to claim housing is more affordable than it was in 1955 I'm going to need to see a citation.
Even if we accept the (I think dubious) claim that we're worse off than people were in the 1950s (or whatever) there's thousands of years of procreation that precede that one specific comparison. Those people had it much worse than we do and they had many more children.
It’s unpleasant to live with 5 people on 20sqm, but if people can do it in Africa we can certainly do it in the US.
I'm getting myself, my wife, and my two kids to BMX practice (yes, with bikes) in a compact sedan.
What are people filling all that space with? Do you pack like you're crossing the Sahara every time you leave the house?
I came back and added this:
If houses were still built like they used to be, with walls and separation, it'd be easier to fit more people and stuff into fewer square feet, but even a roomy new home feels like there's always somebody with you.
I'd love to move into something small and inexpensive, but my 2 bedroom town home will have to do for the time being. Works just fine for us.
Apparently I had forgotten that you can have more than two kids for a moment. I don’t know anybody who does, at this point, just read about them on the Internet.
[1] https://seb.se/privat/livet/att-skaffa-barn/sa-paverkar-ett-...
That's just another way to say they're inherently expensive. If they weren't, why are you adjusting your expectations?
I do think we exaggerate greatly how expensive kids are, for the most part the "exchange" is in time and not money. However, they are still a noticeable cost especially in countries with not great support systems.
I agree. If you can have one person stay home kids are pretty cheap. My wife won't stay home, but if we could swap salaries I'd do it myself in a heartbeat.
Everything else (sports, school, toys, etc.) is expectation.
The main exception I can think is family support; having younger grandparents and great grandparents could be an advantage, I guess?
I'm not sure I'd look at a society where people have lots of children so they can put them to work and say "yeah, this is the way society should be!"
Interestingly, genetic mutations from the mother are roughly constant regardless of her age. Paternal genetic mutations rise with age. IIRC a 38 year old man's sperm has double the number of mutations a 28 year old man has.
> Ireland's average age of marriage in 1830 was 23.8 for women and 27.47 for men where they had once been about 21 and 25, respectively, and only about 10% of adults remained unmarried;[22] in 1840, they had respectively risen to 24.4 and 27.7;[23][24] in the decades after the Great Famine, the age of marriage had risen to 28–29 for women and 33 for men and as much as a third of Irishmen and a fourth of Irishwomen never married due to chronic economic problems that discouraged early marriage.
Doesn't really contradict what I said, although the age gap between bride and groom was fairly variable (but no country that I'm aware of has a pattern of older bride, younger groom).
When I was born in 1991 and my sister in 1995, a simple police officer and a nurse in half-time could provide for two children with ease, in one of what was even back then one of the most expensive cities in Germany. Today, me (IT worker) and my s/o (public health administration) can barely afford a flat and two cats.
Fuck that shit, we need rent controls, higher wages and higher taxes on the rich. Then people like me are not forced to wait until 35 that they can start having children.
Energy, on the other hand, not so.
It's a choice in the same sense that I've chosen not to buy a Ferrari because I can't afford one.
Quite a lot of them died in childbirth.
An example of this is that freezing your eggs costs upwards of $30k, and is still viewed as something only very select late 30's successful women do.
Isn't that also very unreliable ? When we went to IVF clinic they told us that freezing the eggs has much lower chance of them being usable compared to fertilized eggs.
AFAIK it has been shown many times that "career woman" is absolutely not a trait men find attractive.
So girls grow up with a career-oriented mindset, and don't do any careful thinking about what they want, or think about kids/family as something they will do "later" or "when I'm ready" and before they know it they find themselves at 35 years old and unable to get pregnant.
Although these issues can prop up at any age, the statistical chance of something going wrong keeps going up. Moreover, there’s the constant fear with every miscarriage that we’re getting even older and even more likely to run into bigger problems.
I’m honestly surprised by how little people talk about these issues.
There's been some changes to make having kids less of a challenge in recent years - at least in Europe. But it still seems like there's a long way to go, especially in terms of corporate cultures that, in my experience, don't really know what to do with young parents.
What do they not know? I’ve been mostly treated fairly (not exactly a young parent though).
My (now) wife and I got pregnant in our senior year of college. That summer I had the good fortune to land my first software dev internship.
At the end of the summer, I was to be given an offer letter to come on as a full time employee after I finished school. I asked in that meeting if I could just continue to work and was told "uh yeah, that's fine I guess". Major victory for me at the time.
I did not share that I was soon to be a father until a few weeks before the baby was due. I was afraid that this situation would negatively color their perceptions of me and my work. But eventually the time came.
I pulled my tech lead aside and asked if I would be able to take a few days off for the birth. He said of course, but, at the time, I was still an hourly employee. My first son was born on Tuesday, I took unpaid time off for the rest of the week, then returned to the office less than a week after my son was born, the following Monday. I really had no other choice - I had been working for about 5 months at the time, and certainly couldn't afford to take any more hit to my paycheck.
About a month later, I asked HR if I had any kind of PTO accrued to take some time off for Christmas. This wound up being how I became a salaried employee - they felt bad that I didn't have PTO and said basically "oh, well, you're full time now anyway, we'll just convert you to salary."
I want to be clear that there was no malice or anything involved in any of these situations, and as a matter of fact, the company was very supportive and provided an absolutely wonderful first job. But still, there was just no procedure or infrastructure in place to support a 23 year old father. Everything that was done to help me through my internship and eventually full time employment was in some sense a just-in-time hack, done by kind people who knew and cared about me.
Had my career started at Accenture or some other gigantic corporate machine, I assume none of those things would have happened for me, even if the HR people were similarly benevolent. Even with all my good fortune, being a parent within the first few months of my professional career was difficult.
Nowadays, 6 weeks of parental leave seems to be pretty standard for professional jobs, and I imagine that benefit would extend even to someone at the entry level (maybe not an intern, but FTEs). But this is a pretty recent development. When my second child was born, I took a week off.
Later that year, the company implemented a single week of paternal leave for new parents , which you would just receive as an extra 5 days of PTO. A very kind and good technical manager, without my asking, went to bat for me and got me the week of PTO refunded, effectively grandfathering me into the new benefit. No one had to do that for me, it didn't even occur to me to ask - but I have remembered that act of care from him for a long time.
So, all told, I had a pretty good level of company support as a young parent. But it's quite easy for me to imagine that any of these strokes of fortune wouldn't have occurred for many others in similar situations.
Had you started at Accenture it wouldn't have been any worse, but you probably would not have gone weeks (months?) as a full-time unsalaried employee with no PTO.
Skin elasticity and athleticism decreases with age, and that translates into worse tearing, and more difficult births, longer recovery, and more trouble keeping up with a baby after all that.
Then, on top of all that, your parents are entering their sunset years rather where you have to help them rather than having grandparents young enough to help you with your kids.
It's also linked to things like low birth weight. I sure wish my wife & I had started earlier.
From a selfish perspective, I was too young to really understand what I was taking on, and it's been difficult at times. I missed out on many things. Not much of my adult life has been focused solely on my needs.
However from a family perspective, it has worked out quite well. I worked some difficult jobs at first but eventually got my degree, started a career, left to cofound a startup, bought a house. Kids are doing well.
People think you have to do all that before you have kids, but that's not true. When you're already young, kinda dumb and kinda poor then you can make it work.
I'm now 37 and my youngest is 10, so I'm not running around chasing kids anymore. I've got enough energy to help them with school. I like being a young dad now.
And then if they wait a while I could be pushing 70 before my grandkids arrive. Great-grandkids might be a relic of a time gone by...
They seem to be the case for me. My five are 20-30. I see no avenue for grandkids where it takes 3-4 incomes to afford minimal living expenses.
Great-grandma would 60, and hell, with some luck, great-great-grandma might have been kicking around still at 80!
Honestly, I think for them it just wasn't that odd in their community. I grew up in a more suburban area and the baby boom was definitely a few years later comparatively speaking.
I have several aunts and uncles who are great-grandparents and in the 60-70 year old range.
I was born when my mother was 17. I had my first daughter when I was 25 (and therefore her grandmother was 42). I’m 38 today.
In an urban economy kids are largely dead weight and expensive for two decades. The middle class dual income family isn’t typically looking for 3+ kids anymore.
It’s possible for the poorest people to have more kids than anyone while economic pressures also lower birth rates across the board.