Loving Late Motherhood

From Halle to J. Lo to Julia, the public is going ga-ga over celebrity offspring. And with the spotlight shining bright on baby bumps galore, it seems that Hollywood starlets are starting families later and later (Jamie Lynn Spears aside). But deciding to become a first-time mom after 35 or 40 isn't pioneering anymore. It's the new norm.

The number of women who've delayed first-time motherhood until their mid-thirties or beyond has grown tenfold over the past 30 years according to researcher Elizabeth Gregory, associate professor and director of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Houston and the author of the new book titled, Ready: Why Women are Embracing The New Later Motherhood (Basic Books 2008).

Gregory, a first-time mother herself at age 39, spent two and a half years interviewing 113 women who had children in their mid-thirties or older about their choices and the consequences.

"Women are choosing when they want to have children for the first time in history," she told me in an interview this week. She says their decisions, due in part to birth control, longer life expectancy and new fertility technologies are spurring societal changes including more participatory dads and more employers accommodating family-friendly schedules.

"Most consistently, I heard (from the women) that waiting offered them the chance to establish themselves, as individuals and in their work, to find the right partners...and to achieve a measure of financial stability. When they did have their kids, they felt ready to focus on their children's development rather than their own," Gregory says.

So maybe us Gen-X slackers had it right all along. We've been delaying marriage and parenthood to find ourselves and at the same time maturing so we could actually handle the responsibility of raising a child.

Motherhood unfolded so differently for our own moms. When my mom gave birth to me in 1970, the average age of a new mother in the US was 21. And while my aspirations as a little girl included being a mom someday, it was never in the context of choosing to pursue a profession or not. Thanks to Title IX and the feminist voices who really changed the landscape for me and my contemporaries, I grew up thinking I could be anything I wanted to be and have it all.

But somewhere along the way, I became aware of biological realities. Despite advances in fertility treatments, it's tough to ignore the ticking clock at some point. Gregory found that her research subjects were keenly aware of the timeline. I was, when I finally hit thirty. But the chance to live the life of a single working person, to pay my own bills, to bask in my own professional accomplishments, and most importantly, to know I can support myself and live independently were tremendously important lessons for me. And now at age 37, with two-year-old twins, I think I am a better mother for it.

When I turned 23, a year older than the age my mom had me, motherhood was the last thing on my mind. Fresh from grad school, I was in hot pursuit of my first TV reporting job and had somehow patched together a bunch of freelance gigs to make my rent. I was living in New York City in a crowded apartment with four, sometimes five female roommates who all had lots of drama in their lives (or so it seemed at the time). I remember sipping wine on Sunday nights while we gabbed for hours about our work, our love lives, politics, not to mention our worried parents, anxious about us single gals living in the big city. It was heaven. Looking back, I wouldn't trade that indulgent time in my life for anything. And I hope my daughter won't either.

"If you are perfectly set up to have a family at 32, then fine. But if you are not, why add the burden of all this anxiety?" asks Gregory. She hopes her research will empower other women to feel confident in their decisions to choose motherhood when it feels right.

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Be well this week.

Comments

[CarolEM]

Age is a factor. You are pushing it after 35 and we all know it. i agree you shouldn't have kids before your ready but come on i think many of us bought into an idea that we were "better" then our mothers having kids wasn't progressive....and now years later in our thirties we realize we didn't know it all. And a lot of us have paid the price for it. There's just no getting around it. But i refuse to let it stop me from living my life. There are many women before us that made it thru such disappointments in life...by the way my mom had me at 41.

[Orikinla]

My mother had her first child at 15 and my father was 35.
I was born when she was 23 and she had her last child at 36.

In Nigeria, my people regard late marriage and late motherhood as a curse.

They fast and pray against the evil spirits of late marriage and late motherhood.

This false belief has misled millions of Nigerian single women into wrong marriages as they rushed into wedlock and many are now trapped with husbands who maltreat them in the prison of their life sentence called marriage

[pompous]

I agree that people should choose motherhood when they are ready. By ready I mean mentally. I have a son who is almost a year old and I will be turning forty in another month. This works for me. Some people are good with motherhood in their twenties. I will say that having children in the very late forties and early fifties is pushing it - even if science has made it possible.

[brooklyncitizen]

Well biology is very honest in telling us what our bodies' limitations are. We are meant to breed in our 20's and just becasue we have the ability to have kids later in life doesn't mean it is the best time to do it.


My parents had me really late during their mid 40's and I rememember being 8 years old when they were in their 50's .My mother has Alzheimer and I am her caregiver and still young (35) and it is really not what I thought I'd be doing at this age. She's had it for most of my adult life and yes it is anecdotal but old age does bring illness and complications that adult children have to bear .

[GibsonGirl99]

I cannot decide where to come down on this issue, other than: do what feels right for you, if you can afford it! As the child of a young mother, whose whole life was taken up with being a mother, I can testify to the benefits of having a youthful, energetic person as your principal role model. On the other hand, I know quite a few mothers who waited, and as long as your life doesn't explode (death, divorce, drugs, etc.) it seems to work out fine. But one friend is now wanting to retire and can't - since she has a son who just will not grow up & leave the nest (yet, she lets him stay, so....). There are pluses and minuses for either position, therefore, somewhat in the spirit of Swift: personally, I would think that SEVERAL WOMEN WHO ARE REALLY RICH need to endow several chairs for WOMEN to study SCIENCE at MANY universities, so that a method can be perfected wherein we can all a) conceive and bear our children when young, (so that our bodies can recover with less trouble), but then b) put said children in suspended animation at birth, thus allowing us to raise them when either our means or our dispositions are at their child-raising-readiness maximum! And this process must be FREE, and AVAILABLE to ALL WOMEN!!

[rssrai]

I had my children at 19, 20, and 22. It was hard work, but I have no regrets because I am now 54 years old, and I have three grown sons who are great to be with, and this is so much better than have young kids. I went to disney world with my grown sons and it was great. It was like having 4 best friends including my husband with me doing fun things. I love the freedom I have now. Having grownup children when I am still young enough to enjoy them is great.

[dblgoldens]

I could not disagree more with this article or the sentiment that women can and should have babies from 35 on. Has the women's movement taught us nothing? Sadly, we the Gen Xers (I am 37, and so far childless) were the test case for our mothers' activism. Although Title IX leveled out the playing fields, we still have not figured out how to change biology. While I can agree that I am a calmer and wiser person at 37 than I was at 25, and that might make me a better mother, my body doesn't think so. It in fact knows so. (And so do the single men who often choose to date the 29 year-olds instead of their same-aged peers so they don't have to hurry up and have that baby right away!)

I realize this is a great irony and that as women we are plagued with yet another burden. What about telling our sisters in their early to mid 20's to have their kids NOW? 40 is the new 30 after all, or so they say. That way our bodies don't have to be sacrificed and pumped with synthetic hormones and our parenting skills may fall back onto something called discipline rather than the art of negotioating. How about putting our energy into creating viable daycare at our places of work to support mothers of any age? How about women supporting each other instead of quietly judging each other's choices? It only breeds resentment, and that my sisters was not ever the point of feminism.

[Mort]

My best friend in high school had a terrible generation gap with his retirement age parents. While can be exciting to have children later in life, there are some drawbacks that ought to be seriously considered before jumping in.

[loril]

Happy to learn I am in good company. I am a midlife mom and I always seem to be the oldest person in the room. I know there are more of us out there...I just wish I personally knew more women in their late 30s and early 40s with babies-preschoolers.

I never thought I would be lucky enough to find the right person and get myself into a position financially to have a child. I pretty much gave up the idea by my early 30s. A few years later, my life changed and I found myself pregnant at 37. My experience has made me profoundly grateful for my daughter. I can never take her for granted because I never assumed I would be a mother.

Although I ended up with a c-section, my pregnancy was amazingly easy. I conceived quickly and felt wonderful throughout. I know it is not a cakewalk for every woman, but "older" women should know that your experience does not always have to be harrowing, fraught with expense and intervention and in any way abnormal. I felt confident, excited and "ready". Perhaps my psychological state of mind helped me.

There are days when I really wish I had become a mother sooner. I worry about being in my 60s and 70s when my daughter is still a young woman. However, there are no guarantees in life, so I cannot let these vague fears overide the joys of being her mom.

Motherhood is filled with very slow days where nothing much happens. Often you are cooped up. Often, you cannot get out much -- or when you do make plans, they fall through because your child gets sick. One benefit for me is that I know I had 20 years to get out there...I find it easier to be a home-body now. I wonder how different my approach would be if I was a first time mom at age 25? There are definitely pros and cons on both sides. Bottom line: do it when it works best for you.

[rini]

We humans have no trouble reproducing enough to propagate the species. There are almost seven billion of us.

If someone wants to delay motherhood and enjoy other things that life has to offer.... I'm all for it. We don't have to exponentially increase the population every 15 years. People live longer and more functionally than ever before. There is no need to have a kid early.

There is the problem of infertility, but delaying motherhood is all about informed decision making and balancing the risk/benefit.