Stanford Study Finds New Dads In US Are Older Than Ever (mercurynews.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: American fathers keep getting older, raising the prospect of increased birth defects but also greater economic and emotional security for U.S. families, according to new research from Stanford University's School of Medicine. The average age of the fathers of newborns in the United States has climbed by 3.5 years over the past four decades, growing from 27.4 years in 1972 to 30.9 years in 2015, said the study -- the nation's most detailed analysis ever of paternal age. The number of newborns whose fathers were over age 40 has more than doubled over the past four decades. Those births now make up nearly 9 percent of births in the U.S., Dr. Michael Eisenberg and Yash Khandwala reported in the journal Human Reproduction. The share of fathers who were over age 50 rose from 0.5 percent to 0.9 percent. Asian-American fathers -- men of Japanese and Vietnamese descent, in particular -- are the oldest, becoming fathers at the average age of 36 years, the study said. Black and Hispanic men are the youngest fathers -- age 30.4 and 30, respectively. White men, on average, have children at age 31. Paternal age rose with educational attainment. The typical newborn's father with a college degree is 33.3 years old -- compared with 29.8 years for high school graduates.

Comments

Re:There's just so much more to accomplish today.

[TWX]

The stories I've heard from my in-laws lend evidence that men were not terribly involved in the lives of the young children or even at-times the family. My FIL didn't get married until his forties, and most of his friends that did marry young still went out drinking with the guys, even as their wives became pregnant and raised children.

If expectations now are shifting more toward participation with the family then it would follow that men might be more inclined themselves to hold-off having kids until they're ready. Also, the use of birth control being more acceptable means that people generally have more options to entertain themselves without having kids.

Re:There's just so much more to accomplish today.

[AmiMoJo]

This. Men are slowly being liberated, like women were in the 60s, from the old gender roles and can now be much more involved with their children with little social stigma. Unfortunately there is still a lot of pressure to take less paternity leave than their partner, and the change is taking much longer than it did for women, but it's happening.

Of course some people see this as a bad thing. They seem to want to go back to the old 1950s model of children being the mother's sole responsibility, except for the odd punishment beating when they misbehave. They see women's liberation as ruining that sweet set-up for them.

See the story "The Midas Plague"

[Paul Fernhout]

"Then the whole economy collapses anyways because a consumption based economy can't function without consumers who all just died out"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their quotas. The story deals with Morey Fry, who marries a woman from a higher-class family. Raised in a home with only five rooms she is unused to a life of forced consumption in their mansion of 26 rooms, nine automobiles, and five robots, causing arguments. Trained as an engineer, Morey modifies his robots to enjoy helping to consume his family's quota. He fears punishment when his idea is discovered, but the Ration Boardâ"which has been looking for a way to abolish itselfâ"quickly implements Morey's idea across the world."