How do you think of this? That is, do you believe it?
If this is true, if a family happens to have many children, statistically speaking, the older siblings will have longer lives than their younger siblings!
Nowadays, many young people tend to get married late and have their first child late due to various reasons.
Can we go back to those days when a high school graduate still has a decent chance to make it to the middle class?
Too much education is “bad” (and taking too long to establish a career is “bad” also) if it makes more people get married late.
Any other bad effect when we have children late in life? A downside I can think of: May still need to pay for higher education tuitions and expenses when you are about to retire! (In our case, we only have about less than a decade of our life time to “prepare” for our retirement after our child graduated from college.)
Well, I am doomed then. My mom was 32 when she had me, her first kid. I recall sitting on the beach (at the age of 10 or so) and thinking how good the other kids had it - their young moms were snorkeling and doing all sorts of stuff with them, while all my mom wanted was to just sit on the beach and read…
My mother was 38 when she had me and I was almost 41 when I had S2. The only downside to my child is that he barely knew any grandparents. But he got my and DH’s maturity and financial security.
Longevity can be a matter of genes but I’m less inclined to believe it is a matter of mom’s age when you are born over other inherited factors.
I have thought maybe it would have been better to have my kids at a younger age when I had more energy but I doubt they would have survived–my patience level increased a thousand fold the older I got.
I think there are a few concerns with waiting until say over 35 to start trying. One is that I’m not sure if women are informed of fertility issues over 35. They see people and celebrities waiting until their 40s and don’t realize how much fertility declines starting in the late 30s. From what I understand the likelihood of downs syndrome increases with age, I wonder if other issues do as well that just haven’t been proven. But I’d sure rather see someone a little older than a little too young having a baby. I’d choose a 38 yo mom over a 16 yo in most cases.
Having children late doesn’t seem to be an issue with my own or those of my classmates’ families that I knew growing up or immigrants who had to delay due to poverty and trying to survive wartime conditions in their nations of origin.
It felt more of my HS classmates had parents who had them in their late 30’s and up(some started in their late 40’s) than parents who had them in their late teens* to mid-'20s.
Incidentally, in my extended family…having kids in one’s 40’s women included was the norm. In fact, when a female cousin had her first in her mid-30s, that felt pretty early to most.
Incidentally, having children or being married extremely young was somewhat stigmatized among the kids who had aspirations of graduating HS and going on to college/armed forces/skilled vocations as there was a strong association with neighborhood teens who became pregnant and ended up having to drop out and settle for an extremely economically precarious existence.
All never or barely completed HS in the US or abroad before working and having kids and didn't want their kids to repeat the struggles they had to endure partially from not going further in their education and having kids so young.
What I couldn’t tell from scanning the study was how much of the difference in average and median life expectancy was due to higher infant (and near-infant) mortality. I believe that, except for very young teens (under 15), birth complications and infant mortality and morbidity are positively correlated with maternal age. Some of that gets muted now with much better, more intensive medical care for infants with problematic circumstances, but all of the children in the study were born before 1901, so high-tech medicine was not a factor.
It’s also possible that some of the difference would have been due to the well-known higher incidence of things like Down’s Syndrome for children of older mothers. It used to be taken for granted that children with Down’s Syndrome would die young, even if they survived infancy.
I would absolutely believe that higher infant mortality and birth defects for children of older mothers would reduce the average life expectancy of the older-mother cohort as a group. But that would not mean that children of older mothers who survived infancy and who did not have major complications would have shorter lives than similar children of younger mothers.
My sort of joke is, “It was one thing to be pregnant when I was 40. It was something else entirely to be chasing after a toddler with a poopy diaper when I was 42.”
I had my first son when I was almost 35 and my second when I was almost 38. I didn’t intentionally wait to have them until I was that old. Infertility played a huge role. I once had a preschool teacher tell me that she was sure that my oldest son spent quite a bit of time with his grandparents because he has such an “old soul” I informed her he has no living grandparents, just “old parents” I’d like to think having children later helped keep me young.
I had S number one at almost 38, son number two at almost 40. I never felt old and had more energy than most of the mothers who were younger than me… I did not get married till 35. My husband was almost 39 when we got married. So, I guess we are considered older parents but we look and act younger than people younger than us. Depends on your genes and your activity level.
This feels like the correlation between ice cream cone sales and drowning. Yes, it may be high, but what the heck–not much we can do about it even if these events are correlated.
Not sure why the article focused solely on women, but old sperm can also be a problem for the baby and carry damaged DNA. Those percentages escalate greatly when either mom or dad is over 40. I think early 30s is a great time to have kids. And not just downs, but they are finding links to all sorts of life altering conditions…which may or may not impact life span. I just the original article posted took a very narrow view of the potential impact of over 40 parents having babies.
My Mom was 37 and Dad was 41. I have a brother that’s 7 years older than me and a sister that’s 10 years older than me. I often felt like an only child because of the age gap, I felt I missed out on things that my friends did with their families because my older sibs weren’t interested. My Dad died at 53 (heart attack). Mom died at 78.
