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Delayed Fatherhood May Be Linked To Certain Congenital and Mental Disorders
New submitter optimus_phil writes "New Scientist magazine reports on findings that suggest that delaying fatherhood may increase the risk of fathering children with disorders such as Apert syndrome, autism and schizophrenia. The article reports that 'although there is a big increase in risk for many disorders, it's a big increase in a very small risk. A 40-year-old is about 50 per cent more likely to father an autistic child than a 20-year-old is, for instance, but the overall risk is only about 1 per cent to start with.'"
With a 50% divorce rate in the US, if you have children and you're the primary wage earner, it is likely you
1) Pay for kids that you only get to see 20% of the time
2) Pay your ex-spouse for his'/her's decision/ability to make less money than you do
3) Pay your ex-spouse's legal bills so that person can cause you as much pain as possible in court
I think it is a horrible deal.
And the legal system becomes the other person's weapon to abuse you.
Miss a payment, and you're screwed.
If you want children, donate your source code.
If you want to raise kids, date someone who has nice kids.
I have a somewhat more optimistic view of the future than you seem to -- I do think we're heading for a low point in some areas right now, but I also think these things often go in cycles and that since most people are basically decent human beings we will learn to deal with the problems and fix them with time. There will be more later, but that's life.
Personally, I wonder how much the kinds of health effects we're discussing here make a difference compared to the potential benefits of having parents who are a bit older. For example, if older parents tend to be more financially secure, they can probably afford a better home in a safer neighbourhood and a safer model of car. Maybe they can afford better educational toys or more books or to take their children to more places and given them more positive experiences as they grow up. More mature and experienced parents can also share the benefits of that experience with their children, perhaps giving the kids a head start in academic life or more emotional support when they have to deal with difficult situations.
There's got to be some sort of balance here. Very young parents don't tend to do well by their kids, because they can't. Maybe they lack sufficient resources to care for them properly, and maybe they are still barely more than children themselves emotionally. On the other hand, relatively old parents tend to have kids with more health problems as we've been discussing, and obviously at some point in your life you can no longer mother a new child at all. The interesting thing to me is how to figure out what gives kids the best outcomes under different circumstances, so would-be parents can make informed decisions based on seeing the whole picture.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It might be possible that the advantage of receiving long telomeres from an old father is more than offset by the disadvantage of higher levels of general DNA damage and mutations in sperm
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Well if you're a whackjob that believes in 'a destiny of sorts' then my rationale will never make it through your selfish shield of emotional appeal will it?
Fact of the matter is we're all born to die due to a runaway genetic program that, due to the second law of thermodynamics, is clearly a dead end road. It doesn't care about you and uses you only for it's insanely dead-end process of creating more robot producing genetic robots to no real purpose. Through programmed death it discards us as only so much used-up tissue paper so why should we have any more respect or reverence for it than it has for us? We toil and labour under the guaranteed threat of our own demise and for what? This insane loop that seeks to preserve itself in a perpetual birth, life, and death process that will, ultimately, in the heat death of the universe, amount to nothing anyway except for maybe all of the suffering it laid waste to along the way?
You can unthinkingly promote the subjucation of those who never needed to be subject to it in the first place if you like. I personally think a short circuiting of the entire process is far more (and pre-emptively) compassionate. That is all.