{"id":1367,"date":"2013-07-29T11:01:24","date_gmt":"2013-07-29T05:31:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mohamediqbalp.wordpress.com\/?p=1367"},"modified":"2013-07-29T11:01:24","modified_gmt":"2013-07-29T05:31:24","slug":"marry-young-else-your-children-may-be-born-defective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/venusimportexport.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2013\/07\/29\/marry-young-else-your-children-may-be-born-defective\/","title":{"rendered":"Marry Young !! Else Your Children May be Born Defective"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"primary-title\">\n<h2><strong>How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society<\/strong> The scary consequences of the grayest generation.<\/h2>\n<p class=\"byline\">BY <span class=\"authors\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newrepublic.com\/authors\/judith-shulevitz\">JUDITH SHULEVITZ<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"primary\">\n<div id=\"controls\">\n<ul class=\"controls-list\">\n<li class=\"read-later-control\"> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newrepublic.com\/article\/politics\/magazine\/110861\/how-older-parenthood-will-upend-american-society#\">Read Later<\/a> <\/li>\n<li class=\"listen-control listenable-item\"> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newrepublic.com\/article\/politics\/magazine\/110861\/how-older-parenthood-will-upend-american-society#\">Listen<\/a> <\/li>\n<li class=\"font-size-control\"> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newrepublic.com\/article\/politics\/magazine\/110861\/how-older-parenthood-will-upend-american-society#\">Font Size<\/a> <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul class=\"social controls-list\">\n<li class=\"facebook-control\"> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newrepublic.com\/article\/politics\/magazine\/110861\/how-older-parenthood-will-upend-american-society#\">Facebook<\/a> <\/li>\n<li class=\"twitter-control\"> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newrepublic.com\/article\/politics\/magazine\/110861\/how-older-parenthood-will-upend-american-society#\">Twitter<\/a> <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"intro\"><\/div>\n<p class=\"legacy-image\"><span class=\"dropcap\">O<\/span>ver the past  half century, parenthood has undergone a change so simple yet so  profound we are only beginning to grasp the enormity of its  implications. It is that we have our children much later than we used  to. This has come to seem perfectly unremarkable; indeed, we take note  of it only when celebrities push it to extremes&mdash;when Tony Randall has  his first child at 77; Larry King, his fifth child by his seventh wife  at 66; Elizabeth Edwards, her last child at 50. This new gerontological  voyeurism&mdash;I think of it as doddering-parent porn&mdash;was at its maximally  gratifying in 2008, when, in almost simultaneous and near-Biblical acts  of belated fertility, two 70-year-old women in India gave birth, thanks  to donor eggs and disturbingly enthusiastic doctors. One woman&rsquo;s husband  was 72; the other&rsquo;s was 77.<\/p>\n<p class=\"legacy-image\">These, though,  are the headlines. The real story is less titillating, but it tells us a  great deal more about how we&rsquo;ll be living in the coming years: what our  families and our workforce will look like, how healthy we&rsquo;ll be, and  also&mdash;not to be too eugenicist about it&mdash;the future well-being of the  human race.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad-layer\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1374003608987-0\" class=\"ad-iframed ad-left ad-inline\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>That  women become mothers later than they used to will surprise no one. All  you have to do is study the faces of the women pushing baby strollers,  especially on the streets of coastal cities or their suburban  counterparts. American first-time mothers have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/nchs\/data\/nvsr\/nvsr61\/nvsr61_01.pdf\">aged about four years<\/a> since 1970&mdash;as of 2010, they were 25.4 as opposed to 21.5. That average,  of course, obscures a lot of regional, ethnic, and educational  variation. The average new mother from Massachusetts, for instance, was  28; the Mississippian was 22.9. The Asian American first-time mother was  29.1; the African American 23.1. A college-educated woman had a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/nchs\/data\/nhsr\/nhsr051.pdf\">better than one-in-three<\/a> chance of having her first child at 30 or older; the odds that a woman  with less education would wait that long were no better than one in ten.<\/p>\n<p>It  badly misstates the phenomenon to associate it only with women: Fathers  have been getting older at the same rate as mothers. First-time fathers  have been about three years older than first-time mothers for several  decades, and they still are. The average American man is between 27 and  28 when he becomes a father. Meanwhile, as the U.S. birth rate slumps  due to the recession, only men and women over 40 have kept having more  babies than they did in the past.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In short, the  growth spurt in American parenthood is not among rich septuagenarians or  famous political wives approaching or past menopause, but among roughly  middle-aged couples with moderate age gaps between them, like my  husband and me. OK, I&rsquo;ll admit it. We&rsquo;re on the outer edge of the  demographic bulge. My husband was in his mid-forties and I was 37&mdash;two  years past the age when doctors start scribbling AMA, Advanced Maternal  Age, on the charts of mothers-to-be&mdash;before we called a fertility doctor.  The doctor called back and told us to wait a few more months. We  waited, then went in. The office occupied a brownstone basement just off  the tonier stretches of New York&rsquo;s Madison Avenue, though its tan,  sleek sofas held a large proportion of Orthodox Jewish women likely to  have come from another borough. The doctor, oddly, had a collection of  brightly colored porcelain dwarves on the shelf behind his desk. I  thought he put them there to let you know that he had a sense of humor  about the whole fertility racket.<\/p>\n<p>The steps he told us we&rsquo;d have  to take, though, were distinctly unfunny. We&rsquo;d start with a test to  evaluate my fortysomething husband&rsquo;s sperm. If it passed muster, we&rsquo;d  move on to &ldquo;injectables,&rdquo; such as follicle-stimulating and luteinizing  hormones. The most popular fertility drug is clomiphene citrate,  marketed as Clomid or Serophene, which would encourage my tired ovaries  to push those eggs out into the world. (This was a few years back;  nowadays, most people take these as pills, which are increasingly common  and available, without prescription and possibly in dangerously  adulterated form, over the Internet.) I was to shoot Clomid into my  thigh five days a month. Had I ever injected anything, such as insulin,  into myself? No, I had not. The very idea gave me the willies. I was  being pushed into a world I had read about with intense dislike, in  which older women endure ever more harrowing procedures in their  desperation to cheat time.<\/p>\n<p>If Clomid didn&rsquo;t work, we&rsquo;d move into  alphabet-soup mode: IVF (in vitro fertilization), ICSI (intracytoplasmic  sperm injection), GIFT (gamete intrafallopian transfer), even ZIFT  (zygote intrafallopian transfer). All these scary-sounding reproductive  technologies involved taking stuff out of my body and putting it back  in. Did these procedures, or the hormones that came with them, pose  risks to me or to my fetus? The doctor shrugged. There are always risks,  he said, especially when you&rsquo;re older, but no one is quite sure whether  they come from advanced maternal age itself or from the procedures.<\/p>\n<p>My  husband passed his test. I started on my routines. With the help of a  minor, non&ndash;IVF-related surgical intervention and Clomid, which had the  mild side effects of making me feel jellyfish-like and blurring my  already myopic vision, I got pregnant.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad-layer\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1374003608987-1\" class=\"ad-iframed ad-left ad-inline\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>My  baby boy seemed perfect. When he was three, though, the pediatrician  told me that he had a fine-motor delay; I was skeptical, but after a  while began to notice him struggling to grasp pencils and tie his shoes.  An investigator from the local board of education confirmed that my son  needed occupational therapy. This, I discovered, was another little  culture, with its own mystifying vocabulary. My son was diagnosed with a  mild case of &ldquo;sensory-integration disorder,&rdquo; a condition with symptoms  that overlapped with less medical terms like &ldquo;excitable&rdquo; and  &ldquo;sensitive.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Sitting on child-sized chairs outside the little gyms  in which he exercised an upper body deemed to have poor muscle tone, I  realized that here was a subculture of a subculture: that of mothers who  spend hours a week getting services for developmentally challenged  children. It seemed to me that an unusually large proportion of these  women were older, although I didn&rsquo;t know whether to make anything of  that or dismiss it as the effect of living just outside a city&mdash;New  York&mdash;where many women establish themselves in their professions before  they have children.<\/p>\n<p>I also spent those 50-minute sessions  wondering: What if my son&rsquo;s individual experience, meaningless from a  statistical point of view, hinted at a collective problem? As my  children grew and, happily, thrived (I managed to have my daughter by  natural means), I kept meeting children of friends and acquaintances,  all roughly my age, who had Asperger&rsquo;s, autism, obsessive-compulsive  disorder, attention-deficit disorder, sensory-integration disorder.  Curious as to whether there were more developmental disabilities than  there used to be, I looked it up and found that, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/features\/dsdev_disabilities\/index.html\">according to the Centers for Disease Control<\/a>,  learning problems, attention-deficit disorders, autism and related  disorders, and developmental delays increased about 17 percent between  1997 and 2008. One in six American children was reported as having a  developmental disability between 2006 and 2008. That&rsquo;s about 1.8 million  more children than a decade earlier.<\/p>\n<p>Soon, I learned that medical  researchers, sociologists, and demographers were more worried about the  proliferation of older parents than my friends and I were. They talked  to me at length about a vicious cycle of declining fertility, especially  in the industrialized world, and also about the damage caused by  assisted-reproductive technologies (ART) that are commonly used on  people past their peak childbearing years. This past May, an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nejm.org\/doi\/full\/10.1056\/NEJMoa1008095\">article in the <em>New England Journal of Medicine<\/em><\/a> found that 8.3 percent of children born with the help of ART had  defects, whereas, of those born without it, only 5.8 percent had  defects.<\/p>\n<p>A phrase I heard repeatedly during these conversations  was &ldquo;natural experiment.&rdquo; As in, we&rsquo;re conducting a vast empirical study  upon an unthinkably large population: all the babies conceived by older  parents, plus those parents, plus their grandparents, who after all  have to wait a lot longer than they used to for grandchildren. It was  impressed upon me that parents like us, with our aging reproductive  systems and avid consumption of fertility treatments, would change the  nature of family life. We might even change the course of our  evolutionary future. For we are bringing fewer children into the world  and producing a generation that will be subtly different&mdash;&ldquo;phenotypically  and biochemically different,&rdquo; as one study I read put it&mdash;from previous  generations.<\/p>\n<p class=\"rtecenter\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad-break ad-layer\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1374003608987-2\" class=\"ad-iframed ad-center\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"rtecenter\"><span class=\"dropcap\">W<\/span>hat  science tells us about the aging parental body should alarm us more  than it does. Age diminishes a woman&rsquo;s fertility; every woman knows  that, although several surveys have shown that women&mdash;and  men&mdash;consistently underestimate how sharp the drop-off can be for women  after age 35. The effects of maternal age on children aren&rsquo;t as  well-understood. As that age creeps upward, so do the chances that  children will carry a chromosomal abnormality, such as a trisomy. In a  trisomy, a third chromosome inserts itself into one of the 23 pairs that  most of us carry, so that a child&rsquo;s cells carry 47 instead of 46  chromosomes. The most notorious trisomy is Down syndrome. There are two  other common ones: Patau syndrome, which gives children cleft palates,  mental retardation, and an 80 percent likelihood of dying in their first  year; and Edwards syndrome, which features oddly shaped heads, clenched  hands, and slow growth. Half of all Edwards syndrome babies die in the  first week of life.<\/p>\n<p>The risk that a pregnancy will yield a trisomy  rises from 2&ndash;3 percent when a woman is in her twenties to 30 percent  when a woman is in her forties. A fetus faces other obstacles on the way  to health and well-being when born to an older mother: spontaneous  abortion, premature birth, being a twin or triplet, cerebral palsy, and  low birth weight. (This last leads to chronic health problems later in  children&rsquo;s lives.)<\/p>\n<p>We have been conditioned to think of  reproductive age as a female-only concern, but it isn&rsquo;t. For decades,  neonatologists have known about birth defects linked to older fathers:  dwarfism, Apert syndrome (a bone disorder that may result in an  elongated head), Marfan syndrome (a disorder of the connective tissue  that results in weirdly tall, skinny bodies), and cleft palates. But the  associations between parental age and birth defects were largely  speculative until this year, when researchers in Iceland, using  radically more powerful ways of looking at genomes, established that men  pass on more de novo&mdash;that is, non-inherited and spontaneously  occurring&mdash;genetic mutations to their children as they get older. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v488\/n7412\/full\/nature11396.html\">In the scientists&rsquo; study, published in <em>Nature<\/em><\/a>,  they concluded that the number of genetic mutations that can be  acquired from a father increases by two every year of his life, and  doubles every 16, so that a 36-year-old man is twice as likely as a  20-year-old to bequeath de novo mutations to his children.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Nature<\/em> study ended by saying that the greater number of older dads could help  to explain the 78 percent rise in autism cases over the past decade.  Researchers have suspected links between autism and parental age for  years. <a href=\"http:\/\/archpsyc.jamanetwork.com\/article.aspx?articleid=668208\">One much-cited study from 2006<\/a> argued that the risk of bearing an autistic child jumps from six in  10,000 before a man reaches 30 to 32 in 10,000 when he&rsquo;s 40&mdash;a more than  fivefold increase. When he reaches 50, it goes up to 52 in 10,000. It  should be noted that there are many skeptics when it comes to explaining  the increase of autism; one school of thought holds that it&rsquo;s the  result of more doctors making diagnoses, better equipment and  information for the doctors to make them with, and a vocal parent lobby  that encourages them. But it increasingly looks as if autism cases have  risen more than overdiagnosis can account for and that parental age,  particularly paternal age, has something to do with that fact.<\/p>\n<p>Why  do older men make such unreliable sperm? Well, for one thing, unlike  women, who are born with all their eggs, men start making sperm at  puberty and keep doing so all their lives. Each time a gonad cell  divides to make spermatozoa, that&rsquo;s another chance for its DNA to make a  copy error. The gonads of a man who is 40 will have divided 610 times;  at 50, that number goes up to 840. For another thing, as a man ages, his  DNA&rsquo;s self-repair mechanisms work less well.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad-break ad-layer\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1374003608987-3\" class=\"ad-iframed ad-center\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>To the danger of age-related genetic mutations, geneticists are starting to add the danger of age-related <em>epigenetic<\/em> mutations&mdash;that is, changes in the way genes in sperm express  themselves. Epigenetics, a newish branch of genetics, studies how  molecules latch onto genes or unhitch from them, directing many of the  body&rsquo;s crucial activities. The single most important process  orchestrated by epigenetic notations is the stupendously complex  unfurling of the fetus. This extra-genetic music is written, in part, by  life itself. Epigenetically influenced traits, such as mental  functioning and body size, are affected by the food we eat, the  cigarettes we smoke, the toxins we ingest&mdash;and, of course, our age.  Sociologists have devoted many man-hours to demonstrating that older  parents are richer, smarter, and more loving, on the whole, than younger  ones. And yet the tragic irony of epigenetics is that the same  wised-up, more mature parents have had longer to absorb air-borne  pollution, endocrine disruptors, pesticides, and herbicides. They may  have endured more stress, be it from poverty or overwork or lack of  social status. All those assaults on the cells that make sperm DNA can  add epimutations to regular mutations.<\/p>\n<p>At the center of research  on older fathers, genetics, and neurological dysfunctions is Avi  Reichenberg, a tall, wiry psychiatrist from King&rsquo;s College in London. He  jumps up a lot as he talks, and he has an ironic awareness of how  nervous his work makes people, especially men. He can identify: He had  his children relatively late&mdash;mid-thirties&mdash;and fretted throughout his  wife&rsquo;s pregnancies. Besides, he tells me, the fungibility of sperm is  just plain disturbing. Reichenberg likes to tell people about all the  different ways that environmental influences alter epigenetic patterns  on sperm DNA. That old wives&rsquo; tale about hot baths or tight underwear  leading to male infertility? It&rsquo;s true. &ldquo;Usually when you give that  talk, men sitting like that&rdquo;&mdash;he crossed his legs&mdash;&ldquo;go like this,&rdquo; he  said, opening them back up.<\/p>\n<p>Dolores Malaspina, a short, elegantly  coiffed psychiatrist who speaks in long, urgent paragraphs, has also  spent her life worrying people about aging men&rsquo;s effects on their  children&rsquo;s mental state&mdash;in fact, she could be said to be the dean of  older-father alarmism. In 2001, <a href=\"http:\/\/archpsyc.jamanetwork.com\/article.aspx?articleid=481752\">Malaspina co-authored a ground-breaking study<\/a> that concluded that men over 50 were three times more likely than men  under 25 to father a schizophrenic child. Malaspina and her team derived  that figure from a satisfyingly large population sample: 87,907  children born in Jerusalem between 1964 and 1976. (Luckily, the Israeli  Ministry of Health recorded the ages of their fathers.) Malaspina argued  that the odds of bearing a schizophrenic child moved up in a straight  line as a man got older. Other researchers dismissed her findings,  arguing that men who waited so long to have children were much more  likely to be somewhat schizophrenic themselves. But Malaspina&rsquo;s  conclusions have held up. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/12860771\">A 2003 Danish study<\/a> of 7,704 schizophrenics came up with results similar to Malaspina&rsquo;s,  although it concluded that a man&rsquo;s chances of having a schizophrenic  child jumped sharply at 55, rather than trending steadily upward after  35.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;I often hear from teachers that the children of much older  fathers seem more likely to have learning or social issues,&rdquo; she told  me. Now, she said, she&rsquo;d proved that they can be. Showing that aging men  have as much to worry about as aging women, she told me, is a blow for  equality between the sexes. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a paradigm shift,&rdquo; she said.<\/p>\n<p>This  paradigm shift may do more than just tip the balance of concern away  from older mothers toward older fathers; it may also transform our  definition of mental illness itself. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s been my hypothesis, though it  is only a hypothesis at this point, that most of the disorders that  afflict neuropsychiatric patients&mdash;depression, schizophrenia, and autism,  at least the more extreme cases&mdash;have their basis in the early processes  of brain maturation,&rdquo; Dr. Jay Gingrich, a professor of psychobiology at  the New York State Psychiatric Institute and a former colleague of  Malaspina&rsquo;s, told me. Recent mouse studies have uncovered actual  architectural differences between the brains of offspring of older  fathers and those of younger fathers. Gingrich and his team looked at  the epigenetic markings on the genes in those older-fathered and  younger-fathered brains and found disparities between them, too. &ldquo;So  then we said: &lsquo;Wow, that&rsquo;s amazing. Let&rsquo;s double down and see whether we  can see differences in the sperm DNA of the older and younger  fathers,&rsquo;&rdquo; Gingrich said. And they didn&rsquo;t just see it, he continued;  they saw it &ldquo;in spades&mdash;with an order of magnitude more prominent in  sperm than in the brain.&rdquo; While more research needs to be done on how  older sperm may translate into mental illness, Gingrich is confident  that the link exists. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a fascinating smoking gun,&rdquo; he says.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad-break ad-layer\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1374003608987-4\" class=\"ad-iframed ad-center\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Epigenetics  is also forcing medical researchers to reopen questions about fertility  treatments that had been written off as answered and done with.  Fertility doctors do a lot of things to sperm and eggs that have not  been rigorously tested, including keeping them in liquids (&ldquo;culture  media,&rdquo; they&rsquo;re called) teeming with chemicals that may or may not  scramble an embryo&rsquo;s development&mdash;no one knows for sure. There just isn&rsquo;t  a lot of data to work with: The fertility industry, which is  notoriously under-regulated, does not give the government reports on  what happens to the children it produces. As Wendy Chavkin, a professor  of obstetrics and population studies at Columbia University&rsquo;s school of  public health, says, &ldquo;We keep pulling off these technological marvels  without the sober tracking of data you&rsquo;d want to see before these things  become widespread all over the world.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Clomid, or clomiphene  citrate, which has become almost as common as aspirin in women  undergoing fertility treatments, came out particularly badly in the  recent <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nejm.org\/doi\/full\/10.1056\/NEJMoa1008095\"><em>New England Journal of Medicine<\/em> study<\/a> that rang alarm bells about ART and birth defects. &ldquo;I think it&rsquo;s an  absolute time bomb,&rdquo; Michael Davies, the study&rsquo;s lead researcher and a  professor of pediatrics at the University of Adelaide in Australia, told  me. &ldquo;We estimate that there may be in excess of 500 preventable major  birth defects occurring annually across Australia as a direct result of  this drug,&rdquo; he wrote in a fact sheet he sent me. Dr. Jennita Reefhuis,  an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control, worries that  Clomid might build up in women&rsquo;s bodies when they take it repeatedly,  rather than washing out of the body as it is supposed to. If so, the  hormonal changes induced by the drug may misdirect early fetal  development.<\/p>\n<p>Another popular procedure coming under renewed  scrutiny is ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection). In ICSI, sperm or a  part of a sperm is injected directly into an extracted egg. In the  early &rsquo;90s, when doctors first started using ICSI, they added it to in  vitro fertilization only when men had low sperm counts, but today  doctors perform ICSI almost routinely&mdash;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/art\/art2008\/section5.htm\">procedures more than doubled<\/a> between 1999 and 2008. And yet, ICSI shows up in the studies as having  higher rates of birth defects than any other popular fertility  procedure. Among other possible reasons, ICSI allows sperm to bypass a  crucial step in the fertilization of the egg&mdash;the binding of the head of  the sperm with the coat of the egg. Forcing the sperm to penetrate the  coat may be nature&rsquo;s way of maintaining quality control.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"dropcap\">A<\/span> remarkable feature of the new older parenting is how happy women seem  to be about it. It&rsquo;s considered a feminist triumph, in part because it&rsquo;s  the product of feminist breakthroughs: birth control, which gives women  the power to pace their own fertility, and access to good jobs, which  gives them reason to delay it. Women simply assume that having a serious  career means having children later and that failing to follow that  schedule condemns them to a lifetime of reduced opportunity&mdash;and they&rsquo;re  not wrong about that. So each time an age limit is breached or a new ART  procedure is announced, it&rsquo;s met with celebration. Once again,  technology has given us the chance to lead our lives in the proper  sequence: education, then work, then financial stability, then children.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad-break ad-layer\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1374003608987-5\" class=\"ad-iframed ad-center\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>As  a result, the twenties have turned into a lull in the life cycle, when  many young men and women educate themselves and embark on careers or  journeys of self-discovery, or whatever it is one does when not  surrounded by diapers and toys. This is by no means a bad thing, for  children or for adults. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/17605519\">Study after study has shown<\/a> that the children of older parents grow up in wealthier households,  lead more stable lives, and do better in school. After all, their  parents are grown-ups.<\/p>\n<p>But the experience of being an older parent  also has its emotional disadvantages. For one thing, as soon as we  procrastinators manage to have kids, we also become members of the  &ldquo;sandwich generation.&rdquo; That is, we&rsquo;re caught between our toddlers  tugging on one hand and our parents talking on the phone in the other,  giving us the latest updates on their ailments. Grandparents well into  their senescence provide less of the support younger grandparents  offer&mdash;the babysitting, the spoiling, the special bonds between children  and their elders through which family traditions are passed.<\/p>\n<p>Another  downside of bearing children late is that parents may not have all the  children they dreamed of having, which can cause considerable pain. <a href=\"http:\/\/link.springer.com\/article\/10.1023\/B:POPU.0000021074\">Long-term studies have shown<\/a> that, when people put off having children till their mid-thirties and  later, they fail to reach &ldquo;intended family size&rdquo;&mdash;that is, they produce  fewer children than they&rsquo;d said they&rsquo;d meant to when interviewed a  decade or so earlier. A matter of lesser irritation (but still some  annoyance) is the way strangers and even our children&rsquo;s friends confuse  us with our own parents. My husband has twice been mistaken for our  daughter&rsquo;s grandfather; he laughs it off, but when the same thing  happened to a woman I know, she was stung.<\/p>\n<p>What haunts me about my  children, though, is not the embarrassment they feel when their friends  study my wrinkles or my husband&rsquo;s salt-and-pepper temples. It&rsquo;s the  actuarial risk I run of dying before they&rsquo;re ready to face the world. At  an American Society for Reproductive Medicine meeting last year, two  psychologists and a gynecologist antagonized a room full of fertility  experts by making the unpopular but fairly obvious point that older  parents die earlier in their children&rsquo;s lives. (&ldquo;We got a lot of  blowback in terms of reproductive rights and all that,&rdquo; the gynecologist  told me.) A mother who is 35 when her child is born is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ssa.gov\/oact\/STATS\/table4c6.html\">more likely than not to have died by the time that child is 46<\/a>.  The one who is 45 may have bowed out of her child&rsquo;s life when he&rsquo;s 37.  The odds are slightly worse for fathers: The 35-year-old new father can  hope to live to see his child turn 42. The 45-year-old one has until the  child is 33.<\/p>\n<p>These numbers may sound humdrum, but even under the  best scenarios, the death of a parent who had children late, not to  mention the long period of decline that precedes it, will befall those  daughters and sons when they still need their parents&rsquo; help&mdash;because,  let&rsquo;s face it, even grown-up children rely on their parents more than  they used to. They need them for guidance at the start of their careers,  and they could probably also use some extra cash for the rent or the  cable bill, if their parents can swing it. &ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t have children  till your forties, they won&rsquo;t be launched until you&rsquo;re in your sixties,&rdquo;  Suzanne Bianchi, a sociologist who studies families, pointed out to me.  In today&rsquo;s bad economy, young people need education, then, if they can  afford it, more education, and even internships. They may not go off the  parental payroll until their mid- to late-twenties. Children also need  their parents not to need <em>them<\/em> just when they&rsquo;ve had children of their own.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad-break ad-layer\">\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1374003608987-6\" class=\"ad-iframed ad-center\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>There&rsquo;s  an entire body of sociological literature on how parents&rsquo; deaths affect  children, and it suggests that losing a parent distresses young adults  more than older adults, low-income young adults more than high-income  ones, and daughters more than sons. Curiously, the early death of a  mother <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/discover\/10.2307\/2096138?%20uid=2129&amp;uid=2&amp;uid=70&amp;uid=4&amp;sid=21101454111591\">correlates to a decline in physical health in both sexes<\/a>,  and the early death of a father correlates to increased drinking among  young men, perhaps because more men than women have drinking problems  and their sons are more likely to copy them.<\/p>\n<p>All these problems  will be exacerbated if we aging parents are, in fact, producing a  growing subpopulation of children with neurological or other disorders  who will require a lifetime of care. Schizophrenia, for instance,  usually sets in during a child&rsquo;s late teens or early twenties. Avi  Reichenberg sums up the problem bluntly. &ldquo;Who is going to take care of  that child?&rdquo; he asked me. &ldquo;Some seventy-five-year-old demented father?&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>This  question preys on the mind of every parent whose child suffers a  disability, whether that parent is elderly or not. The best answer to it  that I&rsquo;ve ever heard came from a 43-year-old father I met named Patrick  Spillman, whose first child, Grace, a four-and-a-half-year-old, has a  mild case of cerebral palsy. (Her mother was 46 when Grace was born.) In  his last job, Spillman, stocky and blunt, directed FreshDirect&rsquo;s coffee  department. Now, he&rsquo;s a full-time father and advocate for his daughter.  He spends his days taking Grace to doctors and therapists and  orthotic-boot-makers, as well as making won&rsquo;t-take-no-for-an-answer  phone calls to state and city agencies that might provide financial or  therapeutic assistance. How does he face the prospect of disappearing  from her life? A whole lot better than I would. (My lame-joke answer,  when my children ask me that question, is that I plan to live forever.)  &ldquo;We&rsquo;re putting money aside now,&rdquo; he said. Into a trust, he adds, so that  government agencies can&rsquo;t count it against her when she or a caregiver  goes looking for Medicaid or other benefits.<\/p>\n<p>Spillman also  prepares Grace for the future by practicing tough love on her, refusing  to do for her anything she could possibly do for herself. Her mother, he  says, sometimes pleads with him to help Grace more as she stumbles over  the tasks of daily life. But he won&rsquo;t. At her tender age, Grace already  dresses and undresses herself; every morning, Spillman explained, they  do a little &ldquo;tag check dance&rdquo; to make sure nothing&rsquo;s inside out. When,  he says, someone makes fun of her way of walking and chewing and  speaking, as he believes someone will inevitably do, &ldquo;I want her to have  years and years of confidence behind her.&rdquo; He adds, &ldquo;She&rsquo;s going to go  to college. She will be well-adjusted. She won&rsquo;t be able to live on a  nineteenth-floor walk-up, but she will live a normal life.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"dropcap\">W<\/span>hen  we look back at this era from some point in the future, I believe we&rsquo;ll  identify the worldwide fertility plunge as the most important legacy of  old-age parenting. A half-century ago, demographers were issuing  neo-Malthusian manifestoes about the overpeopling of the Earth.  Nowadays, they talk about the disappearance of the young. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.un.org\/esa\/population\/publications\/worldfertility2009\/%20fertility_wallchart09_%20Front.pdf\">Fertility has fallen below replacement rates<\/a> in the majority of the 224 countries&mdash;developing as well as  developed&mdash;from which the United Nations collects such information, which  means that more people die in those places than are born. Baby-making  has slumped by an astonishing 45 percent around the world since 1975. By  2010, the average number of births per woman had dropped from 4.7 to  2.6. No trend that large has a simple explanation, but the biggest  factor, according to population experts, is the rising age of  parents&mdash;mothers, really&mdash;at the birth of their first children. That  number, above all others, predicts how large a family will ultimately  be.<\/p>\n<p>Fewer people, of course, means less demand for food, land,  energy, and all the Earth&rsquo;s other limited resources. But the  environmental benefits have to be balanced against the social costs.  Countries that can&rsquo;t replenish their own numbers won&rsquo;t have younger  workers to replace those who retire. Older workers will have to be  retrained to cope with the new technologies that have transmogrified the  workplace. Retraining the old is more expensive than allowing them to  retire to make way for workers comfortable with computers, social media,  and cutting-edge modes of production. And who will take care of the  older generations if there aren&rsquo;t enough in the younger ones?<\/p>\n<p>If  you&rsquo;re a doctor, you see clearly what is to be done, and you&rsquo;re sure it  will be. &ldquo;People are going to change their reproductive habits,&rdquo; said  Alan S. Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at the  Columbia University medical school and the editor of an important  anthology on the origins of schizophrenia. They will simply have to  &ldquo;procreate earlier,&rdquo; he replied. As for men worried about the effects of  age on children, they will &ldquo;bank sperm and freeze it.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>Would-be  mothers have been freezing their eggs since the mid-&rsquo;80s. Potential  fathers don&rsquo;t seem likely to rush out to bank their sperm any time soon,  though. Dr. Bruce Gilbert, a urologist and fertility specialist who  runs a private sperm bank on Long Island, told me he has heard of few  men doing so, if any. Doctors have a hard enough time convincing men to  store their sperm when they&rsquo;re facing cancer treatments that may poison  their gonads, Gilbert said. The only time he saw an influx of men coming  in to store sperm was during the first Gulf war, when soldiers were  being shipped out to battlefields awash in toxic agents. Moreover, sperm  banking is too expensive to undertake lightly, up to $850 for  processing, then $300 to $500 a year for storage. &ldquo;There needs to be a  lot more at stake than concern about aging and potential for genetic  alterations,&rdquo; Gilbert said. &ldquo;It has to be something more immediate.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>What  else can be done? Partly the same old things that are already being  done, though perhaps not passionately enough. Doctors will have to get  out the word about how much male and female fertility wanes after 35;  make it clear that fertility treatments work less well with age; warn  that tinkering with reproductive material at the very earliest stages of  a fetus&rsquo;s growth may have molecular effects we&rsquo;re only beginning to  understand.<\/p>\n<p>But I&rsquo;m not convinced that medical advice alone will  lead people to &ldquo;procreate earlier.&rdquo; You don&rsquo;t buck decades-old,  worldwide trends that easily. The problem seems particularly hard to  solve in the United States, where it&rsquo;s difficult to imagine legislators  adopting the kinds of policies it will take to stop the fertility  collapse.<\/p>\n<p>Demographers and sociologists agree about what those  policies are. The main obstacle to be overcome is the unequal division  of the opportunity cost of babies. When women enjoy the same access to  education and professional advancement as men but face penalties for  reproducing, then, unsurprisingly, they don&rsquo;t. Some experts hold that,  to make up for mothers&rsquo; lost incomes, we should simply hand over cash  for children: direct and indirect subsidies, tax exemptions,  mortgage-forgiveness programs. Cash-for-babies programs have been tried  all over the world&mdash;Hungary and Russia, among other places&mdash;with mixed  results; the subsidies seem to do little in the short term, but may stem  the ebbing tide somewhat over the long term. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/discover\/10.2307\/20058901?%20uid=2129&amp;uid=2&amp;uid=70&amp;uid=4&amp;sid=21101454228111\">One optimistic study done in 2003<\/a> of 18 European countries that had been giving families economic  benefits long enough for them to kick in found a 25 percent increase in  women&rsquo;s fertility for every 10 percent increase in child benefits.<\/p>\n<p>More  immediately effective are policies in place in many countries in  Western Europe (France, Italy, Sweden) that help women and men juggle  work and child rearing. These include subsidized child care, generous  parental leaves, and laws that guarantee parents&rsquo; jobs when they go back  to work. Programs that let parents stay in the workforce instead of  dropping out allow them to earn more over the course of their lifetimes.<\/p>\n<p>Sweden and France, the two showcases for such egalitarian family policies, have among <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cdc.gov\/nchs\/data\/databriefs\/db21.pdf\">the highest rates of fertility in the Western half of Europe<\/a>.  Sweden, however, ties its generous paid parental leaves to how much a  parent has been making and how long she has been working, which largely  leaves out all the people in their twenties who aren&rsquo;t working yet  because they&rsquo;re still in school or a training program. In other words,  even a country with one of the most liberal family policies in the world  gives steeply reduced benefits to its most ambitious and promising  citizens at the very moment when they should be starting their families.<\/p>\n<p>It  won&rsquo;t be easy to make the world more baby-friendly, but if we were to  try, we&rsquo;d have to restructure the professions so that the most intensely  competitive stage of a career doesn&rsquo;t occur right at the moment when  couples should be lavishing attention on infants. We&rsquo;d have to stop  thinking of work-life balance as a women&rsquo;s problem, and reframe it as a  basic human right. Changes like these are going to be a long time  coming, but I can&rsquo;t help hoping they happen before my children confront  the Hobson&rsquo;s choices that made me wait so long to have them.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society The scary consequences of the grayest generation. BY JUDITH SHULEVITZ &nbsp; Read Later Listen Font Size Facebook Twitter Over the past half century, parenthood has undergone a change so simple yet so profound we are only beginning to grasp the enormity of its implications. It is that we&hellip; <br \/> <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/venusimportexport.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2013\/07\/29\/marry-young-else-your-children-may-be-born-defective\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-islam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/venusimportexport.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/venusimportexport.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/venusimportexport.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venusimportexport.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venusimportexport.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/venusimportexport.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/venusimportexport.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venusimportexport.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/venusimportexport.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}