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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.'"

32 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. In other news.. by AlanS2002 · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
    1. Re:In other news.. by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 2, Interesting

      More to the point, the way the world is going, a kid born today as a very high chance of leading a life of debt, unemployment, poverty, starvation, war, and whatever else the future has in store, before dying.

      As far as we're concerned, my s.o. and I, the best time for fatherhood is never, as we reckon giving life today isn't really a gift.

      --
      "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    2. Re:In other news.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But consider what potential your children might have. For all you know, you could father a genius who brings peace and harmony to the world. Or you could father the greatest genocidal maniac of all time who finally puts the world out of its misery.

    3. Re:In other news.. by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

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    4. Re:In other news.. by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 3, Interesting
      In other news, Children with older fathers and grandfathers 'live longer' And quote:

      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

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      Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
    5. Re:In other news.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      I've always wondered if we may be better off looking outside the box here on childbearing ages.

      I think most of us would be in agreement that biologically speaking, young parents are preferred. They have the best quality genetic material, and in the case of the mother childbirth is easier (at times significantly so) on a younger mother than an older mother. And yet at the same time, older parents are socially and economically secure in a way that most young parents cannot match, essentially making them better caregivers.

      Meanwhile there's no reason to believe that parents (as an average) are going to start getting younger again. And I'd actually be surprised if they stopped getting older for at least the next little bit, as we continue to stretch out that early insecure adulthood phase through increasingly rigorous and time consuming education and career building phases.

      So what if instead of trying to find a less-than-ideal balance, we decouple child creation and child rearing entirely? Admittedly I wager this idea is completely infeasible, but it's an interesting thought to me all the same.

      The idea is essentially this: what if we made adoption the preferred method of starting a family rather than procreation? Older parents, socially, emotionally, and financially secure, could adopt healthy children produced by young parents. This provides them with the biological benefits of younger parents, with an added kicker that an adopted child is going to be less disruptive to one's career than bearing a child directly, especially in the mother's case.

      Meanwhile on the supply side we essentially incentivize young couples to have children so that they may be adopted through this system. The ideal age would probably be the late teens, so you'd have the young parents graduate high school and then spend the next 2-3 years producing children. The young parents would be compensated, and from there they could start college at 20-21, with the ability to use that compensation to help cover the lofty costs of college. Finally, in 10-20 years when their own lives are secure, they can become the older parents that adopt children through the very same system.

      This plan has some pretty big flaws, not the least of which is that there's an extremely strong preference among parents to raise children that are biologically theirs and not adopted, so on that basis alone I don't really think such a plan would work. But socially and biologically this seems like it would be a win-win; you get all the biological benefits of young parents and all the social benefits of old parents, minimizing the problems that either scenario alone comes with.

      As a soon to be married woman I'm facing that all too familiar dilemma about career and family. Biologically speaking it's best if I don't wait much longer to start a family, but I know long term it would be better for my family if my career was farther along so that I don't miss out on lifetime earnings and career advancement. The above is probably just a frustrated uterus talking, but given the number of women who are in the same predicament like me, it does make me wonder if some method of decoupling child making and child rearing is the best way to go here.

    6. Re:In other news.. by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 2

      I'm not sure how effectively a complete separation would ever work, given the strength of parent-child bonding in humans. I do think you're on to something there, though.

      I've sometimes wondered whether we've lost some useful structure relatively recently, as a side effect of the easy travel and communication over long distances we enjoy today. Having a local community or extended family where children are not only raised by their parents but also supported by others of their parents' generation, who collectively have both broader experience to share and more reliable survival rates, seems like it has a lot of evolutionary value. That value isn't necessarily carried over to having just parents, professional teachers at school, and maybe professional childcare help to bridge the gaps, with other people the parents know and trust not necessarily living nearby or being regular in-person visitors who can develop relationships with children.

      As another little piece of food for thought, if we're considering the idea that having children later has an advantage in terms of parents' greater maturity and means, we should also consider whether having them earlier has an advantage in terms of support from the grandparent generation, whose means and maturity will typically be greater still.

      --
      If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
    7. Re:In other news.. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Speaking of medicine, how much of that risk increase is due to the advanced age of the father, and how much is related to the extra medical procedures he was subjected to ?

      And how much of it is because Aspies have difficulty with relationships, and get married later in life, after both their social skills and finances have improved? The correlation may be backwards. It may not be older fathers creating autism, but autism creating older fathers.

      disclaimer: I got married when I was 43.

    8. Re:In other news.. by scarboni888 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The unborn are in a place of peace. Who are we to disturb that?

      Every year 2,000,000 people on this planet commit suicide and untold others make the attempt.

      Why bother taking the chance of subjecting some poor unfortunate soul to what amounts to misery and suffering? What gives you the right, especially in a day and age when effective and safe sterilization methods exist?

      Because it was done to you, maybe? I would hope not.

      Every day millions of unfertilized eggs get flushed down the toilets. There's nothing sad about that now is there?

    9. Re:In other news.. by scarboni888 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    10. Re:In other news.. by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 4, Insightful

      More to the point, the way the world is going, a kid born today as a very high chance of leading a life of debt, unemployment, poverty, starvation, war, and whatever else the future has in store, before dying.

      I used to think this way too. But I think the one thing that stands out as irrational in your argument is "today." What is so bad about "today"?

      Go back a hundred years, and the chances of a lot of these things was significantly higher. Go back a few centuries, and most kids died in early childhood, many women died in childbirth, and most people who managed to get to adulthood faced much, much more harsh conditions than the vast majority of people would in an industrialized country would today.

      So, if you want to have a pessimistic worldview, and you think that's a good reason not to have a child, that's fine. But just be honest with yourself and admit that -- by that logic -- the human race should have become extinct a long, long time ago. It has to do with your philosophy and beliefs, not some terrible conditions that are supposedly so much worse "today."

      As far as we're concerned, my s.o. and I, the best time for fatherhood is never, as we reckon giving life today isn't really a gift.

      Life is neither a "gift," nor is it some sort of "punishment." It is simply life. Frankly, while I myself had thought the same thoughts in the past, I have since realized the hypocrisy that often comes with it. If so many things are so terrible in the world today, why not commit suicide right now? If life is "suffering" and having a child is only to bring a new life into a world of suffering, why do you yourself continue to exist?

      And if your answer is simply, "Well, things are getting worse... so I'm still okay, but my child would have a terrible future," then please see above and read some history books. Miraculously, millions of those people in the past didn't commit suicide either, despite the horrendous suffering in their world -- and they even chose to bring more kids into it.

      Don't get me wrong: I have no problem with people who decide not to have kids for whatever reason. I think fewer people probably should have them, since it's a significant responsibility, and people should think about it seriously. But try to be honest with yourself about what your motivations are.

      (Otherwise, you end up going down the bizarre irrational path of philosophers, like David Benatar who advocate that the human race commit collective suicide (see Benatar's book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence), but the philosophers themselves -- despite horrendous suffering in the world, and their likely contribution to more of it every day -- somehow decide that they should themselves continue stay alive. Life really must not seem that bad to most people who make this argument, if they're still living in this world.)

    11. Re:In other news.. by squiggleslash · · Score: 2

      A kid born today has a considerably lower chance of leading a life of (crippling) debt, unemployment (for the most part, 1950-1970s excepting perhaps), poverty, starvation, or war than in the past, at least, if they're lucky enough to be born in the West, which I assume they would be if you were the parents.

      I used to use the same justifications to myself, FWIW. The reality is that I was finding justiifcations for not having children, which was the real issue. I didn't want them. I didn't want the loss of freedom and imposition of responsibilities a child would entail. But such an argument feels selfish (it isn't, but it feels selfish) and so I pretended I didn't want children for the good of the world, and for their own good.

      If you're like 99% of the population, you'll change your mind. Biological programming will overwhelm you when the time is right. You'll view having a child as one of the most wonderful things you could possibly do. You'll recognize that you can actually build a stable environment for your child to come into the world, to learn what they need to do, and to ensure they're equipped with the tools needed to make it in this world.

      One of those tools being, of course, their mere existance.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    12. Re:In other news.. by pnutjam · · Score: 2

      Maybe the pool of woman available to marry older men are either older and "quirkier" themselves, or emotionally damaged young women who my have their own mental issues.

      It's impossible to correctly control for this type of "science". Luckily I snagged a hottie while we were both young, so the human race will have ample access to my excellent genetic material.

  2. correlation, causation, not the droids, etc by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    On the other hand, maybe waiting until you're 40 to have a kid is a symptom of the genes responsible for these disorders.

    1. Re:correlation, causation, not the droids, etc by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 3, Insightful

      More likely a sign of the effect of society on the decision of having a child: either the couple is poor and decides they can't offer the child a good life, or they're still student and they prefer to wait until they're done with their studies and have stable jobs and incomes... that sort of thing.

      --
      "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  3. and the risks of marriage delays parenthood by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:and the risks of marriage delays parenthood by Calydor · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes, because being locked into an unhappy and possibly abusive relationship for life is so much better.

      If your spouse wants to drag you through hell in the legal system, what do you think it'll be like to be forced to keep on living with them?

      --
      -=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
    2. Re:and the risks of marriage delays parenthood by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      Just in case I didn't make it sufficiently clear, I was attempting sarcasm there. The 'good old days' weren't. Hence the heavy drinking and high levels of coercive violence.

    3. Re:and the risks of marriage delays parenthood by Kojiro+Ganryu+Sasaki · · Score: 2

      We need the sarcasm font to be made into a standard.

    4. Re:and the risks of marriage delays parenthood by Kojiro+Ganryu+Sasaki · · Score: 2, Insightful

      There are two reasons for that.

      1: Feminism is reacting to the historical fact that it has usually been the reverse that was true. It is only contraceptives which have managed to change this.

      2: This is compounded, and this is where it probably gets "too complex" for a lot of people, by the fact that this behavior IS inherently sexist. Of course, here a lot of people fail to understand that the famous "patriarchy", which feminists decry, is also sexist toward men.

      Women, it says, are all harmless victims who cannot abuse children. Women are perfect parents who should stay home and care for their children. Men are child abusers and rape monsters and are not fit to care for children.

      Note that there's some overlap between a certain subset of feminists (known as radical feminists) and conservatives to confuse the matter further.

    5. Re:and the risks of marriage delays parenthood by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Makes you wish for the good old days, when people didn't defer marriage because the social costs of doing so were overwhelmingly high, and divorce rates were low because they were hard to get...

      You mean, the good old days when families actually were more stable, and tended to be happier?

      No, don't throw me in the brier patch! Anything but that!

    6. Re:and the risks of marriage delays parenthood by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you want children, donate your source code.

      Court Says Craigslist Sperm Donor Must Pay Child Support. So that is not a real option. So if you are male, you are out of luck.

      Gee, if only there were an entire industry designed around allowing men to donate their sperm while legally shielding them from responsibility for that donation.

  4. Re:I was asked to pass on this note... by Lord+Kano · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Consider this alternative.

    • Excellent choice. You had been scheduled to be the parents of the world's next Hitler but your decision to not procreate will spare untold misery and suffering.
      #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
  5. Actually, Alois Schicklgruber was quite abusive by IgnorantMotherFucker · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Please mail me URLs of software employers.
    1. Re:Actually, Alois Schicklgruber was quite abusive by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 2

      His "irrational" actions resulted in Germany being the master of most of Europe, but nobody ever remembers that one.

      By calling him insane we excuse anyone from examining how he came about. We fail to learn from history. "Oh, he was a madman, nothing to see there," is the attitude.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  6. Actually, no by dutchwhizzman · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?
  7. That was the case with my father by IgnorantMotherFucker · · Score: 2

    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.
  8. Re:There are also significant risks to old mothers by Lairdykinsmcgee · · Score: 2

    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.

  9. "Just" 1% ? by cellocgw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  10. Re:The Kid Bank by sumdumass · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  11. Re:So guys, don't delay that task. by rubycodez · · Score: 2

    maybe that study just confirmed mentally challenged women are more likely to be careless sluts

  12. Re:I was asked to pass on this note... by Roachie · · Score: 2

    Dunning and Kruger seem to be awfully sure of themselves. Just sayin.

    --
    This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.