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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.'"
You have a 100% chance of dying over time.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
On the other hand, maybe waiting until you're 40 to have a kid is a symptom of the genes responsible for these disorders.
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.
Become a father at your earliest opportunity! Onset of puberty being optimal it appears.
Disclaimer - this is to be taken in a sarcastic vein.
You never know...
Consider this alternative.
#Deity
Basically, some things in life are enormous responsibilities that you should face with your eyes open. If you think that you shouldn't have children or own a gun or fly a plane, you're probably right.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
But, some say the EU should be nuked from orbit.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Swiss Child Psychologist Alice Miller devoted twenty years to treating the very worst kinds of child abuse, then decided to stop all treatment of actual patients in hopes of putting a permanent end to that child abuse by writing a great many profoundly insightful books.
Her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty In Child-Rearing And The Roots Of Violence has just four chapters. One of the chapters makes a pretty good case for Adolf Hitler, World War II, NAZI Germany and the Holocaust all being to the fact that Alois Schicklgruber beat the young Adolf Schicklgruber every single day of his young life.
One day when he was thirteen or so - I don't clearly recall when - Adolf stood stoically and calmly for his beating, then at the end of it, told his father how many times his father had hit him, thanked him then calmly walked away. Everyone who witnessed this thought Adolf had gone insane. Perhaps he had.
Most of Miller's books are hugely popular with mental health professionals. Powells always has a whole bunch of copies of each book on its shelves in Portland, Oregon.
Quite likely you can find For Your Own Good in any decent bookstore.
I expect they've been translated to many languages. I'm not sure but I think Miller's Mother Tongue was German. She spoke English, but not very well, so the English-language editions of her books are all translated by experts.
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Mortality has only been the case for about 90% of humans ever born. Statistically speaking, you have a 10% of living forever.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
"But, some say the EU should be nuked from orbit."
Catalans, Basques, Scots etc who want their own little piece of Geography for some nostalgic reason or other.
I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder.
My father's part-time job during high schools was performing mineral assays for the Sierra Nevada, California gold mining industry, so he was accepted to study chemistry at UC Berkeley with wild enthusiasm, right out of high school at the age of eighteen.
Unfortunately he realized just before the last day to withdraw without any grades being recorded, that he'd blown off his entire first term of school by partying with the UCB marching band. He played the sax in the marching band, and was always heavily into music. So he withdrew just before the deadline. When I was a boy, he quite sadly told me that his Berkeley transcripts just say he "attended". No grades, no credit, no fails, but he is recorded to have attended.
He returned home to Grass Valley, and took up the traditional trade of the men in his side of the family, that of carpentry.
When he was twenty-three or so, he joined the Navy as an enlisted man. The Navy sent him to study EE at the U of Idaho, in a program meant for enlisted men who were recognized to have leadership potential. He wasn't actually in the U of I's NROTC, but he studied along with the NROTC students.
When I was born in 1964, he had a BSEE and was a lieutenant in the Navy.
In 1970, a couple of his fellow officers were visiting our home. "Your father is very smart," one of them said to me. "You should ask him questions."
One of my happiest memories is of a contest he proposed, where he and I spent all day long attempting - but both of use failing! - to make working telephones out of random stuff we found lying around the house.
I was accepted to study Astronomy at Caltech in 1982. I was the third coauthor on some Astrophysical Journal articles during the Summer of 1983, as a result of my summer job with Jeremy R. Mould, who is now regarded as the world's most highly-cited Astronomer. I later changed my major to Physics.
I was PERSONALLY tutored in Quantum Mechanics by Richard Feynman.
I was forced to leave the Institute due to my mental illness, but transferred to University of California Santa Cruz, where I earned a BA in Physics. I received an Energy Department grant to write my undergraduate - UNDERGRADUATE now! - thesis at CERN, in Geneva. My advisor Clem Heusch was searching for non-conservation of Lepton number. That was very exciting work; had Clem found what he was looking for, he would have earned the Nobel Prize, and my name would have been on the paper.
I've been a coder now for twenty-six years. My resume is seven pages long.
Could I have done all that had I been born before my father joined the Navy? There's no way to really know but for sure I had many advantages over what I would have had available to me, had he fathered me much younger than he did.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
So, if you are an older father, seeking to reduce their childs risks, simply pick an 18 year-old wife.
For the sake of the children.
http://pediatricbioscience.com...
There are two living grandsons of John Tyler.
Which proves nothing, because this sort of discussion is not about proving things.
What I want to know about the research is how much dope the old coots under consideration did. I submit that the quality of life lived may have as much impact as the quantity, but not quite get teased out as well in the research.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I'm still doubtful with this research because how common is it that a 40 something male marries a 20 something female and have children with her? I think such couples are too unusual to yield any statistical significance to such a research.
According to a Wikipedia article the "Average age difference between couples in developed world is between two to three years, with the female partner being younger". The article supporting this statement can be found here.
I am a 24 years old male and in a serious relationship with someone who is 38 (female). Our situation is, of course, rife with stigma and expected impracticalities, but one of the larger ones we have faced is the dilemma of at some point having a child. We are both aware of the extensive research done on maternal age in relation to congenital problems and disorders, but we were always under the assumption that paternal age doesn't present too much risk. Obviously, my being young does not exactly 'decrease' the risk of the development of congenital disorders, but certainly it seems to not 'increase' that risk. Looking forward, it's a precarious and frightening decision for us to make for a number of reason, the risks involved with maternal age certainly being one of them.
FFS, adopt. Unless your genetics are so precious that they must be preserved, why would you want to fire that old cannon anyway?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Personally I view a significant cogitative or social defect that has a one-percent chance of ocurring to be unacceptably high. That's several kids in each class year in any medium-sized elementary school.
So, yes, I would consider an increase from 1% to 1.5% to be important. Granted, reducing the base probability would be far more useful than dealing with the age-related increase, but either way, these are large numbers compared with, say the usual "cancer risk increases by 5x" headlines which ignore the base risk being maybe 1E-6.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
But I should say, other than being well-taught by my father, it wasn't any kind of connection that got me into Caltech.
An ex-girlfriend of mine at Tech was from a deeply impoverished family. When her father broke the bad news that he could not pay her fees anymore, so she would have to leave Caltech, she burst into tears. Someone advised her to consult the financial aid office, who fixed her right up.
She went on to earn a PhD in Mathematics, and is now a cryptologist for the NSA. Sorry but I feel it would be a bad idea to tell you her name.
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If you murder someone, your male children are unlikely to die for your crime in a Vendetta.
Yes that's the original meaning of Vendetta. Renaissance Italian courts decreed them. Fuck up bad enough, and any male from the offended party's family, had the right to murder any male from three successive generations of the offending party's family - but only when that right was provided by a court of law!
If you have the wherewithal to post to Slashdot, then the life expectancy of your children is likely to be around seventy years. While there are parts of the world that have not made much progress in life expectancy, people in those parts of the world tend not to have computers or Internet.
I reiterate the points that some others have made: your children could be the ones to bring peace and prosperity.
I myself am deeply in debt, profoundly mentally ill, totally busted broke even if I weren't in debt, but I know a great deal, mostly learned through hard-won experience. So I work to educate others, for the most part mostly through my writing, all of which is available online for free, none of which earns me a penny.
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I expect that if you read the actual journal paper, it will go to great length to measure and state just what the correllations are, but is unlikely to do more than suggest avenues of further research into the cause.
I have no doubt whatsoever that if a paper were to claim a cause based purely on a correlation, then the peer reviewers would kick it back. It just wouldn't get published until it stopped making that claim.
It seems reasonable that genetic damage caused by aging could be the cause. For example it is well-established that our Telomeres become damaged with age. But that's the best one can hope for - a reasonable speculation.
Instead the actual cause could be something that is correlated with age. For example high blood pressure is common in older people, so they are advised to eat less salt. Maybe eating less salt makes your children Schizophrenic or Autistic. Young people tend to eat a lot of salty food you see. Now this is a contrived example, but it could work that way, where some other factor that is correlated with age is the actual cause.
On the other hand, I repeatedly point out online, that smoking a lot of marijuana before your brain finishes forming at the age of twenty-five, increases your chance of become Schizophrenic as an adult. Note that the actual cause of this has not been established, but the correlation has been established for many years.
Quite commonly, I am met with the response that those who are predisposed to later become Schizophrenic, like to smoke dope when they are young.
The people who respond to me this way just pull this statement out of their asses. We do not know yet, whether those who are in any way predisposed to become Schizophrenic, also tend to smoke more pot. We only know that they tend to become Schizophrenic after they have done a lot of the evil weed.
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Almost forgotten these days is that CERN wasn't established to discover anything. Much like the Olympics, it was established to give World War II's former enemies something peaceful to do with each other, in hopes of preventing World War III.
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Screw that. I stored them so I can have clones made to harvest organs from as I age. I will likely live forever with the hopes of an entirely new body. And as soon as we can transplant a brain, 15 years later I will finally be able to get laid in high school.
If you think that you shouldn't have children or own a gun or fly a plane, you're probably right.
Same could be said for getting out of bed in the morning, driving a car, having sex, going to crowded public places, etc.
If you think that you shouldn't have children or own a gun or fly a plane, you're probably right.
Actually, thanks to the Dunning–Kruger effect, the people who think they should not do something are typically far more qualified to do that thing than the people who believe they are qualified and that nothing could possibly go wrong.
Humans are strange.
The concept of older people raising the children of younger people is hardly anything new, in fact it's the way things have been done for much of human history, without any ugly parent-child separation via adoption. How? Easy. Children are raised primarily by their grandparents. It's only the modern shift in culture that expects young adults to stand on their own and carve their own path in the world that has disrupted this pattern. It's still somewhat common in some cultures though - American Hispanics spring to mind.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
...And the horse they rode in on. Some of us are having enough trouble dating women what with being a geek and all. Now they go and poke us with pointed sticks. Thanks for nothing, morons!
I was reading that research and it's very interesting. At first glance it appears as though marriage between men 30-35 and women 20-25 was really common (about 60% of marriages) until about 1994 and then plumetted to around 35% practically over night. Looking at a 2nd graph you can see that the women didn't start marrying men their own age, just women aged 20-24 stopped marrying altogether (similar dips in 15-20 and 25-30 but not nearly as pronounced as 20-24). I wonder what is significant about 1994 (other than the Great Pedo Scare starting)...
Older
Wiser
Better able to provide for offspring due to more career development
Higher likelihood of genetically fucked-up kids
Congratulations, DNA, you win the King of All Trolls prize.
..and the Great Cosmic Joke continues. Keep laughing, Universe.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I guess there's some subjectivity in calling something "very small", but I'd call a 1 in 100,000 or 1 in 1,000,000 chance of a disorder to be "very small", not 1 in 100.
why worry about passing "the problem" on to a kid? the kid will have the blessing not having to not ever worry about having a child until he chooses to use technology to have one. what's the problem?
Ecological fallacy
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Women, by and large, are no longer interested in having children by means that would provide for their care and upbringing. They don't want to be wives. They don't want to be mothers in any recognizable traditional sense.
They'd sure like to fuck you if you're tatted-up, drug-addicted, illiterate, unemployed and likely to move to another continent if she gets knocked up. Then she'll go out and find some nice guy to pay for her new "family."
The current legal situation facing would-be fathers makes starting a family more painful than not.
Any man who fathers a child has armed the mother with an incredibly destructive weapon which she can fire at will. The results for the father are financial ruin, loss of his home, loss of his marriage/girlfriend/whatever-the-hell-she-calls-herself, loss of his children, litigation and potential criminal prosecution.
The wife/girlfriend/whatever has significant incentives to fire that weapon: decades of financial support, a free home, the freedom to go fuck some other guy/guys/appliance/porn actor, the satisfaction of destroying her new enemy emotionally as well as practically, total control of the process, the ability to be the center of attention for months and possibly years and the ability to cast herself as the hero and her new enemy as a monster. Why, she can even star in her own reality show.
Although I have never been married, I can't see any reason why any intelligent man would risk all that just to father children. Among other things, this also probably explains why so many men are simply opting out of society altogether.
A 1.5% chance to father an autistic child is really not high on the priority list of things to avoid in 2014.
It's also why millions of women will never be mothers and never be married. Their potential husbands have given up and God bless them one and all. They are only trying to protect themselves from a society that is literally holding a gun to their wallet.
There is nothing wrong with feminism per se. It's only when it became an excuse to hate and destroy men that it began destroying women and our children.
If that's you opinion then you are really out of touch with reality. I can agree that it is likely not as nice to grow up with older parents as it probably would be with younger. An older person may not be as physically fit and capable of sports activities and such things as when he was young. And sure it is a sad thing if being older means that the children will not be as healthy. I'm saying *if* here because I'm not entirely convinced that this really is the case.
But the rest of what you write is naught but hogwash. It's not a parent's job to be 'hip' with what you call 'current culture'. It is his job to represent his or her own and be a good role model for the child. Age has absolutely nothing to do with this. A person does not go obsolete because he older either, on the contrary! Just because you think you're cool using your iPad, iPod, iPhone and all manner of social channels it doesn't mean that you are anything. Pretty much all this technology that is around you is made and founded by the ones you would like to call 'geriatrics' and not the younger generation.
The thing is that there are a lot of people out there who spent a lot of time and energy on their education and careers, simply because they have the genetic capabilities to do so. So I find it kind of sad that such gifted and talented people don't get to have children and pass their talents on to them. The world needs more smart people and to be rid of the low gifted ones. Now that's a sad truth that cannot be denied.
That all may well have some truth. Also, many decades ago, social roles and courtship procedures were more clearly defined (as "manners", and also religious systems). So, it may have been easier back then for Aspies to marry at a younger age with less unstructured social situations to navigate?
Still, another factor could be that vitamin D deficiency may also cause autism, and I wonder if older parents may spend less time outdoors in the sun and so have their young child outdoors less? Older skin also has more trouble making vitamin D. And certainly many Aspies may have intense indoor hobbies and jobs.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
http://www.psychologytoday.com...
This recent study somewhat questions the link through for mothers and kids though (except they cite the population mean which itself seems to be low, which may confound the study IMHO):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
Contrast with supplements needed to adjust for our indoor lifestyle:
http://www.grassrootshealth.ne...
Maybe also of interest on the implications of living in a world with so many artificial toxins in the air and food (like lead and artificial colors) -- where a lack of things like vitamin D and iodine make it harder for kids to deal with the toxins:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Anyway, a complex topic, with pros and cons about everything relative to different situations.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Plenty of them are coldly rational, yet completely unaware that they are floridly delusional.
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women more aged than taught youngins also make bad babies. downs syndrome, etc. i recommend pumping out babies at 25 or 30. your life might not be on track yet but if you're planning on babies, sacrifice one of the parents career for a few years.
You got knocked down to zero yet you have a very valid point.
An older woman has a huge chance of giving birth to a baby with downs syndrome; I found out in an adult manner. Dated an older woman who became pregnant and from then on that was the concern. Amniotic fluid was drawn and tested every month, her being a pro lifer I still wonder if one of the test registered positive.
I was also in my 40's and of course didn't know of this "Older dads' mutant sperm".
I was also working in a field where I was receiving my maximum radiation dose each week when she conceived.
Use protection solves a lot of problems.
I should mention my son was very healthy when he as born and to this day, but the odds were against it; radiation did take it's toll, he was born with no hair or teeth.
Adopt.
Dunning and Kruger seem to be awfully sure of themselves. Just sayin.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.