Old New Parents

By Rebeldad Brian Reid

When, at the tender age of 25, I sat in the waiting room before my wife's prenatal visit, I felt like some kind of teen father, surrounded by bulging bellies and nervous fathers who looked like they had at least a decade more of life under their belt. I figured it was a weird Washington phenomenon -- the average age of a mother having a first child was 24.9 in 2000 -- so I figured I was the normal one and didn't think too hard about it. Until last week.

My erstwhile cube-mate Paul Nyhan at the Working Father blog pointed last week to a bevy of stats compiled by the National Centers for Health Statistics that show that it's not my imagination: The proportion of older parents is accelerating.

The number of moms giving birth from age 35 to 39 was up 28 percent between 1994 and 2004, and the number of moms 40 to 44 was up 63 percent over the same period. That means 14 percent of all mothers fell into that bracket. In 1982, for comparison's sake, 35- to 44-year-old mothers accounted for just 5 percent of new babies.

It's just a hunch, but I'm willing to bet that those figures would be even more striking if you broke out the just the D.C. area.

The explosion in older parents is a huge change, but it leaves me wondering if the graying of parents has any impact on parenting or the quest for balance. I've spilled ink (figuratively) here on how Gen X and particularly Gen Y dads appear to have decidedly more family-centric viewpoints on work when compared to their boomer counterparts. But they are also a shrinking portion of the new parent pie -- hardly the trendsetters.

I think about how my employment status, my mortgage payment and my pragmatism about child care have shifted as I've moved from a twentysomething to a thirtysomething. As the age range of parents widens, I have to ask: Are the balance issues the same for a 20-year-old as they are for a 40-year old? Or do older parents have more options -- nannies, opting out and the like -- that simply aren't feasible for younger parents without longer resumes and longer standing bank accounts?

Brian Reid writes about parenting and work-family balance. You can read his blog at rebeldad.com.

By Brian Reid |  September 6, 2007; 7:00 AM ET  | Category:  Research
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