The biological clock is ticking! Everything in a person’s life comes off as needing to be perfectly timed and each period of one’s life serves different milestones – getting a partner, finding a job, and starting a family – and achieving just one of those things a little late seems to throw a person’s life completely off the rails.
There is immense pressure to achieve certain things at a certain time or before a certain age because at a particular point in life it is ‘too late’. Getting a degree, starting a dream career, having fun or having kids. All of these seem to have an expiration date, and if you have not achieved what you wanted to by forty, it is apparently too late. Yet many people just keep proving these timestamps wrong, especially when it comes to conceiving a child.
Although there are plenty of examples of people having kids later on in their lives, there is a considerable gap between the latest ages men and women have children. While women generally have their late baby sometime in their 40s, men are not afraid of fathering a child even in their 70s.
While a lot of these men have their children with much younger partners, which is one of the reasons that was even possible in the first place, in general, men do not worry about the possibility of health complications their child might have because of their age.
It seems to be common knowledge, that female fertility declines around the age 40-45 and with that the various risks and birth defects that come with pregnancy and birth rise as well. On the flip side, men are believed to be fertile and produce healthy babies in their 60s just as they would in their 20s, and while the decrease in fertility is less significant, it starts to deteriorate around the same age as for women.
Despite all this, older parents are able to have healthy children. Jeff Goldblum, an actor best known for the films Jurassic Park and Jurassic World had both of his children in his 60s, Janet Jackson had her son at fifty and Robert De Niro had his youngest at almost eighty.
Still, health is not the only concern. At school, these parents will be older than others’ grandparents and might struggle with complications of old age before their children are adults. In the worst case, those kids will lose their parent at a very young age and will be unable to play with them like they normally would due to the lack of energy.
