Once women and men figure out that it's better for children to bear them when the parents are under the age of 40, and preferably earlier than that, I suspect we'll see a change in behavior.

Nonsense.

It's not like people are unaware of how aging impacts fertility. Every woman past the age of 30 is aware of the numbers on this, because it's all anyone talks about when you're a post-30 woman with no kids.

If you're a professional, it takes longer to establish yourself than it does if you pump gas for a living. For both genders, having kids means putting off education and career goals, and possibly never getting back on track. Plus, if you are $100,000 in the hole on student loans, you're probably not eager to limit your career potential and take on another huge expense.

People are making much ado about nothing. With life expectancy going up, grandparents can be a vital part of their grandchildren's lives well into their 80s and sometimes 90s. With families scattered all over the country, grandparents aren't always a big factor in their grandkids' lives anyway.

There ARE some downsides to older parenthood. I was adopted at age 3 when my mother was 48 and my father was 60. This meant that I had to delay my own decision to get married and have a child because I was taking care of them. And now that I'm having a baby at 34, my parents are dead at a time when it would have been nice to have them around. But it's hardly going to "upend American society."

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But a little education about the detriments of having children late in life will, I predict, go a long way toward rectifying behavior that can be bad for all concerned.

The problem is that we're going to have choke through a about a generation and a half of women (and some men) that thought "I can put off parenthood until later." Well they are now here and will be of the opinion they were cheated and go ahead and do it anyway, damn the consequences.

Yes, it is silly to think people are going to stop having children after 40 anytime soon - I don't know where Franklin got that idea. It makes no sense. People have been doing it for centuries, including the post-Pill decades.

What I found interesting was Franklin's criticism of the idea that the solution to economic woes is for people to conceive more babies whether they want them or not. That is, it's unusual for men's rights' activists (MRAs) to criticise that aspect of reproductive politics; they usually complain mainly about women who don't passively want whatever men want, whether that means having children or not having them. (Of course, if the woman is already unexpectedly pregnant when the two start to disagree, that's a lot more traumatic, but that's where the subject of better male birth control comes up, IF men really want it.)

And, from Dec. 2nd:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-birthrate-and-americas-future.html?ref=rossdouthat&_r=0

"More Babies, Please" by Ross Douthat.

Not surprisingly, he says nothing about the childfree population as opposed to the childless - that is, if more and more people are turning away from parenthood for reasons that have nothing to do with economics or lack of a good marriage partner, he doesn't want to hear about it. (Of course, maybe he's use smart enough to realize that in this century, Americans do not believe in shaming people into conceiving babies against their will, even for the economy's sake - but eventually, even couples who WANT more babies will not be able to provide enough little taxpayers to make up for those who don't breed, and that's where the new politics will enter the debate.)

I found the Douthat column through Katha Pollitt, who wrote about it in The Nation. First half of her column:

Ross Douthat, The New York Times’s Catholic-conservative columnist, is so obsessed with women’s fertility it’s really too bad he can’t get pregnant himself and see firsthand what it’s all about. Then he might understand a bit more about what women are up against in this world, and why he is wasting his time fretting about hookups and birth control, inveighing against abortion rights and urging women to have large families for the greater glory of God and country. “More Babies, Please” is his latest effort in this vein, keyed to a recent Pew Research Center report that finds that the birthrate fell rapidly between 2007 and 2011 and now stands at the lowest point since 1920, when accurate record-keeping began. The big surprise is that the drop was led by immigrant women, who have historically had more kids than the native-born: while for US-born women the birthrate declined by 6 percent, for foreign-born women it was 14 percent and for Mexican-born women a whopping 23 percent. There are a lot of ways to read this drop: the recession makes people cautious; more women are using better birth control; the more seriously women take their education and their jobs, the less likely they are to have kids before they are good and ready. For college-educated women, raising a child not only costs a fortune while lowering a mother’s income for life; standards of good mothering have been raised so ridiculously high you might as well commit to joining a Buddhist monastery. As for low-income women, pushing them to have fewer kids was one of the goals of welfare reform: maybe it worked.

Douthat believes that our low birthrate means we risk losing our “economic dynamism.” Right: because high birthrate places like sub-Saharan Africa, Gaza and the Philippines are such engines of prosperity and advancement, and low-fertility nations like Germany and Japan are barely getting by. For Douthat, it’s not just that fewer kids mean fewer workers down the road to support Social Security. It’s that women having fewer babies—even no babies!—is “a symptom of late-modern exhaustion” and “decadence”: “It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.”

Oh, honestly. What nonsense. The United States is one of the most innovative countries in the world: we’re so future-oriented we can barely be bothered to read the Times on paper anymore, or buy a book in an actual bookstore—or buy a book, period. The supposedly creative destruction of capitalism is what America’s all about. Granted, it’s nice to hear raising children frankly described as a sacrifice—although surely not one as big as it was back in the days of astronomical rates of death or injury in childbirth, when Theodore Roosevelt was thundering against the “race suicide” committed by white women limiting their fertility. (“Did I write you of my delight at meeting one Hiram Tower, his wife and his seventeen children?” he wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge.) Credit where due: prophets of “demographic winter” usually warn against declining numbers of white people, but Douthat is too savvy to mention as a special concern the fact that white American women have a fertility rate of 1.8, way down there with the women of Old Europe.

Douthat is vaguely aware that it’s not enough to lecture women to lie back and think of George Washington. He acknowledges that US government policy does little to help family stability.......

(snip)

But, aside from Pollitt, if you search on Douthat and "More Babies, Please" you'll find quite a few jeers at Douthat from Slate and other websites.

50% of genetic abnormalities are caused by sperm in older men. The germ cell line ages, and if a mutation happens, it stays in that line forever. Having kids is for the young. It doesn't honestly cost that much (babies don't care what they wear or if their high chair is a hand me down)and the energy to parent is higher in the young.

The current crop of spoiled-ass kids is partially due to older parents with more money than energy. Better than encouraging people to store their gametes, would be to encourage them to use them while they're in their 20's. One can have a career after.

The age of the sperm and eggs isn't the only difficulty in older pregnancies. It's not even the main one. Are we going to have a new industry of younger women carrying kids for older ones? Do we really need to fight biology THAT much?

Yes, women have had babies after 40 for ages. But they didn't usually have *all* their babies at that time, and that often made a world of difference. My mom (not that I vouch for her model of parenting in most ways) had my sister at 42, but if she's not around to be a "vigorous" grandparent when Baby Sis has kids, I will be around to play Super Aunt. My mom's family was one of those huge ones of old---10 kids over 20 years, so the older kids filled a lot of the "social" roles that grandparents and parents-of-young-adults usually have. If you're 30, your parents are dying of old age and you have only a 25-year-old sibling sharing that experience with you, that must be absolutely wretched. My youngest aunt was youngish when her parents died, but she had a whole bunch of older siblings around, an older brother to walk her down the aisle at her wedding, etc. See also: the Palin clan. Yeah, I wouldn't model too much after them, but I do think it's likely that when the parents are gone, at least one of the older kids or one of their kids will be willing to step in for the youngest, who has DS (obviously depends partly on the severity of his disability, whether he needs full-time care or just someone keeping on eye on him while he lives mostly like any other adult).

Another thing I flat don't understand about Second Wave feminists and their desire to push child-bearing to 40----it's way easier to start a new career at 35 or 40 than to start a family at that age. It worked well for me, even though I had my kids younger than is strictly ideal. I can see a woman finishing college at 22, having the kids at 23-28, start refreshing the education when the kids are in preschool, and then really buckle down and start conquering the world career-wise when the kids are in grade-school and a little more self-reliant. It makes more sense than building a business or a career where people rely on you, then making more little people who rely on you completely, and juggling it all.

"Many women have done just that, and Shulevitz is now calling those choices into question."

Before the message feminism got lost on the masses, the idea was...

Who the heck do you, Shulevitz, think you are to tell me or any other woman how to live their life?

Another thing I flat don't understand about Second Wave feminists and their desire to push child-bearing to 40----it's way easier to start a new career at 35 or 40 than to start a family at that age.

Not many women really have a strong desire to wait until 40. It happens because of other reasons. And it's not so easy to start a career at 40. You're competing with much younger women who have more energy to pour into a career and fewer family responsibilities to hold them back. There are trade-offs either way. And even women who want to have children at 20 aren't finding 20-year-old men lining up for the experience, so blaming them solely for the older-parent boom doesn't make a lot of sense.

Babies don't have to cost much in dollars, but they can cost quite a lot in missed financial opportunities. The mommy track is a real thing, and fathers increasingly want more time with their kids, too. Those come at a cost.

We give people a lot of mixed messages. We want hem to be financially secure and able to provide for their children, we want them to have secure marriages with stable partners who are also financially secure, and we want them to have this stuff bolted down by the time they're 23.

The fact is that there are deep economic incentives to hold off on having children. Populations with more education and wealth are motivated to keep families small and wait until they are older to have children, if they want them. The way to reverse this trend is to make us all poor and uneducated. When socioeconomic status is one of the greatest predictors of how successful a child will be, genetics will continue to be a distant consideration.

I think, in time, as a matter of course, we will have men and women pulling their eggs and sperm when they're in their late teens and storing them and then having somebody in a paper shower cap mix them when they're ready. Before too long.

You're probably right about this. And as unromantic as this is, it might be the best solution.

Seriously, much is explained.

Or maybe the answer is you can't have it all?

I think, in time, as a matter of course, we will have men and women pulling their eggs and sperm when they're in their late teens and storing them and then having somebody in a paper shower cap mix them when they're ready. Before too long.

Will that be covered under ObamaCare, and if so, will ObamaCare determine which sperm/egg combinations will be created, and to whom they will be implanted?

The future is nearly upon us: you belong to the all-knowing and wise Government.

Or maybe the answer is you can't have it all?

True. But of the people I know who have waited, "having it all" wasn't the primary motivation. They just wanted to be able to provide a certain standard of living for themselves and their children, which is something we usually applaud.

I think the dangers of waiting are real but overstated. Even people in their mid 30s will usually get pregnant within a year of trying, without medical intervention.

I'm 40 having my first because when I married my husband at 28, I didn't want kids and he had 4 from his first marriage. Seemed perfect.

At some point, I fell in love with his kids and decided I wanted my own. Then it took some time get him on board. Then it took some time to figure out logistics. We do not have room for the baby to have its own room. I finally realized that was OK.

I so agree that it is not ideal at this age, and I generally recommend to others to start by 30.

And even women who want to have children at 20 aren't finding 20-year-old men lining up for the experience, so blaming them solely for the older-parent boom doesn't make a lot of sense.....

We give people a lot of mixed messages. We want them to be financially secure and able to provide for their children, we want them to have secure marriages with stable partners who are also financially secure, and we want them to have this stuff bolted down by the time they're 23.

Posted by: MonicaP at December 30, 2012 9:50 AM
______________________________

Yes, and many parents of teens not only can't grasp that none of that is likely; they can't grasp that all too often, early marriages fail. (Of course, in the pre-WWII era and earlier, girls who married in their teens - with or without parental pressure - would have been considered disgraces to society had they later divorced on almost ANY grounds, including being "too young" at the time, so that's something to remember when we look at the lower divorce rates from past centuries: the rates don't mean that marriages were any happier back then.)

Reminds of one of the few times I disagreed with therapist John Rosemond - in March of 2011, when he told a mother who complained of her 19-year-old daughter's boyfriend: "Do everything you can to keep him!"

(Fast forward: My guess is that since Rosemond is very religious, he's a bit desperate to see all young people married off early, before they spend too much time making themselves "impure." What he doesn't grasp is that there are plenty of reasons not to marry at 20, even if BOTH parties want to and think they're ready.)

Why hold on to the 19-year-old man, since, as the mother says, "the boyfriend’s response to almost anything my daughter says is a cut or put-down, a dismissal of her accomplishment or mocking. She says his father does the same thing to him, his brother and their mother; so to him it’s “ 'normal.' ” ?

Because "he’s not a partier; he doesn’t smoke or drink; he’s serious about his education; and he has a rational career plan mapped out. " Apparently, in Rosemond's mind, this means the girl HAS to marry him, even if he never changes and makes her miserable, because:
"the likelihood of her finding another boy her age who has a coherent plan for the future......is slim........His attempts at bad humor are probably symptomatic of a certain amount of social insecurity. I would forgive him for that. He’s simply got some growing up to do. That’s forgivable, isn’t it? Lastly, I encourage you to let your daughter deal with this in her own way, in her own time. Growing up for this young man means letting go of this annoying habit. Growing up for your daughter means helping him learn the value of letting go of this annoying habit. In short, stay out of it."

Here's one thoughtful comment from the Gaston Gazette:

rosemapologist 11:00 AM on March 2, 2011

"While I understand Rosemond's mentality - that we all need a little patience and acceptance of faults - I also understand other readers responses. It appears this well put together boy may have an inferiority complex to deal with before he runs off someone he may care for or love.

"But before anyone else call for Mr. Rosemond's ouster: It's statistically unlikely at 19 she's found the person she will spend the rest of her life with. True the parents, b/c of their experience in life, recognize a possible troubling pattern, but their daughter needs to learn this lesson - not be told about it. The parents should and will be there to support their daughter they clearly love when the relationship ends, but it's time they let their fledgling learn the dangers and complexities of the real world."

(end of comment)

However, since it IS true that "it's statistically unlikely at 19 she's found the person she will spend the rest of her life with," all the more reason for Rosemond NOT to say "do everything you can to keep him!"

And, as another commentator pointed out, it is NOT a woman's job to "help him learn the value of letting go of this annoying habit." If he doesn't stop the first time she asks - or the first time she dumps him, then he doesn't WANT to change. That's his problem, and she has better things to do. Civilizing unwilling human beings is what ADULTS do to CHILDREN. When it comes to unwilling adults, it is not something any innocent individual should be burdened with (as opposed to the majority of a population trying to civilize the criminal minority, of course).

My guess it that since Rosemond is very religious, he's a bit desperate to see all young people married off early, before they spend too much time making themselves "impure." Not to mention he's never had anything REALLY nice to say about any generation later than his parents', which would explain why he seems to think the girl will never find anyone as "good."

And, last December (here's the second time I semi-disagreed with him) he made it clear he doesn't grasp that only the most religious parents these days INSIST that their daughters marry long before age 25 - or that it's quite normal for families not to be religious about virginity, for women to marry at 30 or later, for women never to marry at all for multiple reasons, etc, etc.

Namely, he told of an 8th-grader who'd announced her plan to have sex with her boyfriend and her wimpy mother who only said "I don't think she's ready to have sex with this boy."

Rosemond said:
"......the age of sexual consent in every U.S. state is between 16 and 18. Mom should point that out and assure the girl that she is not shy about pressing charges against the boy. When the girl tells him that - and she will - he will vanish.

"Lastly, dad is not mentioned by either mom or the therapist. Maybe he's not in the home, but if he's available, then he needs to sit down with his daughter and tell her how much he loves her and how important it will be to him that he walk a virgin to the altar, not to mention how important it will be to her husband."

UGH!

Why does he assume the father (who was likely born after 1970) is that conservative or religious when chances are he's not that different from the mother? On top of that, what if the daughter said "what makes you think I'm EVER going to get married if I don't want to? Why should I marry before 30 if I don't want to? What business is it of yours if I want to fool around later, in my 20s?"

Or, to put a twist on MonicaP's words, even virgins who want to marry at 20 won't find many men under 25 who are willing and able to do so - and if male virgins over a certain age are often visible to the naked eye and thus undesirable, why should 30-year-old female virgins be considered any more desirable as marriage partners?

As the clownish Parolles said in Shakespeare's "All's Well that Ends Well":

" ’Tis a commodity that will lose the gloss with lying; the longer kept, the less worth: off with ’t, while ’tis vendible; answer the time of request. Virginity, like an old courtier, wears her cap out of fashion; richly suited, but unsuitable: just like the brooch and the toothpick, which wear not now. Your date is better in your pie and your porridge than in your cheek: and your virginity, your old virginity, is like one of our French withered pears; it looks ill, it eats drily; marry, ’tis a withered pear; it was formerly better; marry, yet ’tis a withered pear."

> We give people a lot of mixed messages.

Speak for yourself... Me? I'm famous for being indisputably clear.

> "having it all" wasn't the primary motivation.
> They just wanted to be able to provide a
> certain standard of living

"Just"?

When achievement-minded fuckballs wait that long to have retarded children, it's probable that the damage had already been done... They've presumably spent a generation moving through the world with an air of rapacious entitlement, and will think nothing of burdening the commonweal with a child who'll need a lifetime of patience from others. 'Cause gee-golly, they were going for the gold, right? The little people wouldn't understand how hard they worked....

Is there any finer definition of "having it all" than to live without risk or sacrifice?… Or to pass the burden of bad outcomes to others?

A blog mystery from 2012 has found explication, and just under the deadline. Not exactly 2005, when we found out that Deep Throat was Mark Felt, but still... A useful chit of insight.

We give people a lot of mixed messages. We want them to be financially secure and able to provide for their children, we want them to have secure marriages with stable partners who are also financially secure, and we want them to have this stuff bolted down by the time they're 23. -- MonicaP at December 30, 2012 9:50 AM

Yes, and many parents of teens not only can't grasp that none of that is likely; they can't grasp that all too often, early marriages fail. … so that's something to remember when we look at the lower divorce rates from past centuries: the rates don't mean that marriages were any happier back then.) -- lenona at December 30, 2012 3:05 PM

Lenona & Monica,

I'm can't disagree with either of you directly. But I think there are factors that aren't taken into account.

The infancy and childhood mortality rates were much higher in prior to 1950's. They were even worse prior to 20th century, even in the U.S. If you go look through very old cemeteries, and start do the numbers, making it to age ten was half luck.

As far as marrying young -- until the 1920's there were many people who were never more than a 50 mile radius from their homes in their whole lives. Add in that an eighth grade education was the norm, if that much. There was also a different level of responsibility for a 20 year old, than there is now. Prior to the 50's your free teen years were 13 to maybe 16.

So looking at context makes a difference.

"There was also a different level of responsibility for a 20 year old, than there is now. Prior to the 50's your free teen years were 13 to maybe 16."

Another side of that context change is that, for most of the 20th century, it was possible for a 21-year-old man with only a high-school education (if that) to obtain a job that paid well enough to support a family. Not in high style, mind you, but well enough that the family didn't starve. Today, there are precious few jobs available to 21-year-olds that pay well enough for them to even support themselves, much less a family.

(Of course, the flip side of that is that this is the outcome that those 21-year-olds keep voting for.)

Douthat says of those who choose not to have children, "It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be."

See, I would say this is true of a country that leaves its children $16.5 trillion of public debt.

Which is, in fact, by itself a pretty good reason not to have children.

PJ, I loves me some Douthat, but you rule.

Thanks, Crid.

It's taxation without representation. We've been exceedingly clever in taxing people who are too young (or too unborn) to vote, but what are you going to say to your kid, after he pops out? 'Welcome to earth, kid, here's a peanut butter sandwich, now get to work on that $200,000 you were born owing,' or whatever ungodly amount of debt future Americans will be saddled with, upon birth.

I want to smack people who say I should have kids to pay for Social Security.

Who the heck do you, Shulevitz, think you are to tell me or any other woman how to live their life?

Propably the same huburis that feminists have when they dictate to men how to live thier lives, and think their thoughts, and feel the feelings . . .

Or maybe the answer is you can't have it all?

No man was ever delusional enough to think they could, feminism lied - cant get mad at a guy for pointing out a solid fact

I'm a firm believer in passive eugenics. If you cant get pregnant by fucking you shouldnt have kids.

If you would have died of a major disease(cancer, systic fibrosis, genetic diseases) before the age of procreation without massive medical intervention you shouldnt have kids even if you are able.

Nature slated you for childlessness/death. Passing on your crappy genes will only make humans worse