To think asking people if they have grandchildren is like asking if they are pregnant - just don't!

Nasty for saying you don’t look 16 years younger than your age? 😂 If someone said I didnt look 19, I would agree with them and laugh at the craziness of it. It’s pretty ridiculous to think a nearly 50 year old could possible look 33. Many people in their 30s look way younger these days.

It's almost like they don't have a degree.

@LikeWhoUsesTypewritersAnyway I do find it a bit nasty that so many people are adamant they would expect me to be the grandmother of my primary school aged child at school pick up because I’m a going to be an older mother. I also find it offensive that people said things like ‘sadly older mothers don’t have choice’ and alluding to the fact that young mum is best as that isn’t my personal opinion as I would have done a terrible job of raising children in my 20s. I would’ve been short tempered and irate constantly and I would have screwed then up. I don’t think that younger mums are working class and uneducated. I also don’t think just because that is how I would be raising kids in my 20s that all mums in their 20s are like that.

What I said in the post you quoted, was that it was fair that it turned nasty quickly if people were being unfair on young mums. But I also don’t see the need to be nasty. I did find some things a bit offensive but I just stated that I wouldn’t look at things that way in a very level way or that I consider that unfair. Or provided some evidence to show a different view point to show that people have different experiences and perceptions.

I do think often people can have a nerve hit and start typing in anger and retaliation without giving things thought. It’s enough to just lay out why something might be offensive with out being sarky about it. That just gets people’s back arched and turns into an argument and nothing constructive can come of that. As OP said, forums like this are good to widen your viewpoint or see another perspective and it’s pretty hard to do that when it’s all just angry comments. Hence why I skipped through it until we got back to the original topic.

They were definitely thrown first. I did make a comment about older grandparents are more likely to be dead or some words to that effect.
Life expectancy for a male is 78 yr old and female is 82. And I stand by it. Most of my friends who are my age grandparents are dead and died when they were in their late teens/early 20s. Of course you can live until you’re over 100. But they are the stats.

As it always is on here

Of course it can make you feel a bit odd to suddenly realise that you are entering/have entered a new stage of life all of a sudden with a comment like that. I think most of us will have moments like that. I remember a lady I knew who told me how she'd gone looking to but a pair of jeans, and instead of the finding a good pair in the section with hip clothes for young people, she'd ended up getting a pair from the middle aged lady section because they fir and felt and looked better. It was a moment of reappraisal of her position in life.

But you wouldn't say that the arrangement of clothing brands was offensive. Her age was an objective fact, and her figure which reflected that.

The fact that you suddenly realised you are entirely old enough to be a grandmother is just something that happens at a certain point, and it's generally a healthy thing. The person who said something that made you realise it isn't being offensive. Her comment just happened to be the thing that made you notice.

I was 40 having my youngest child. I did tell them I was old enough to be their grandmother 😂.

But why do you think she is saying the OP looks old? Presumably she looks 49, an age when it is perfectly reasonable for someone to have grandkids.

Are we now supposed to find it offensive when someone correctly guesses our age?

Yes, some people HAVE been 'nasty quickly' for no reason. The attacks on young mums have been dreadful.

As @MiracleCures said

The whole first chunk of this thread was people saying that younger (under 30s) mums were reckless/socially deviant/unambitious/small minded/uneducated.

A whole raft of posts came in calling women who had their first child in their 20s, uneducated, from rough areas, and lower class, amongst many other things. Basically saying if they have a baby - some even said under 35 - that they will have no career, no life, no opportunities, and they will never get to travel etc etc etc....

THOSE insults were thrown first - at younger first-time mums. I have not seen any insults towards older first-time mums. Maybe I missed the 'nasty' comments towards older mums. I haven't seen any. I have seen a LOT of barbed and nasty comments towards younger mums though!

Yes indeed.

Yes indeed.

Whoops forgot to tag the person above saying they are expecting their first grandchild and I can’t remember the name, but congrats to you! That’s very exciting. And sorry to hear about the fertility struggles. It can be so challenging.

@Crushed23 here, here! Most of my friends got pregnant in their first try around 35, 36, 37. I do know others that have had IVF but I equally know people in their 20s and early 30s who have gotten IVF or had to try a long time.

I personally have fertility issues but these were identified in my early 30s and were longstanding and aren’t related to my current age. My fertility issues actually the same scores wise on tests from back then. But having kids before 37 just wasn’t an option for me - I was renting and had to change jobs a lot to get the experience I needed to earn a bit more money to get a house and it was all not the stable environment I would want to bring a child into. I also, to be honest, didnt have any interest! I could’ve done IVF and frozen my eggs a long time ago but we didn’t think we wanted children at all. I’ve been with my husband 15 years. We have decided we do want kids now but if it doesn’t work then we will be okay with that seeing as we have already planned a life of no kids for all this time. So the 37 year olds missing out because they waited isn’t an experience that I am familiar with either! To be fair, the only person who ever told me this was the friend I had who had kids in her early 20s. She said that we would regret not doing it like her, which was frustrating because none of us were anything but supportive of her life which was very different to ours at that time! We didn’t say ‘you’ll regret being a young mum,’ we were just supportive of her doing what she wanted and being happy. Sadly she couldn’t be the same for us and she ultimately left the group.

Also, just to add, some UK stats don’t consider middle age to be until 50-60 these days! So to me being is your 40s is still very youthful, hence why I wouldn’t assume someone is a grandparent in their 40s. My hairdresser is 47 and I honestly have always thought he was younger than me, particularly with his lifestyle. I nearly choked when he told me his age. And he doesn’t have any kids yet but plans to. Working with elderly people I would consider anyone dying in their 70s to be dying very young as the majority of my patients are 80s and 90s, I’ve also had a large number of 100 year olds with the oldest being 107! All of this would skew my viewpoint on the topic.

You don’t understand how averages work, do you?

I don’t know what you mean about myth to wait until you’re 37, as to me, the real myth is that you CAN’T get pregnant at 37 and the whole “fertility falls off a cliff after 35” business, judging by the number of women who find themselves accidentally pregnant in their 40s after they got complacent about contraception. It isn’t teenagers having abortions in greater numbers these days…

Also some quite ageist comments from the older mothers

I’m 65 and am only just expecting our first grandchild . It has taken lots of fertility investigations and a miscarriage which obviously I wasn’t going to tell people about so I had been finding the have you got grandchildren questions a bit awkward to be honest.

This is very true @K0OLA1D! I am 37 and people often think I am a lot younger I think mainly because I’m very short and I have a fringe which stealthily hides all my wrinkles around my forehead and eyes (as I noticed people stopping thinking this during Covid when I had no fringe trims and was wearing a facemask so all you could see were the wrinkles! I promptly stopped getting ID’d). But some people look a lot older and some younger. So it is hard to tell if they are younger grandparents or older parents or whatever. We probably often assume based on what we know, ie I would assume they might be the mum and you might assume GP on some occasions as we have had different experiences!

I didn’t read the angry parts of the thread - I skipped ahead as I can’t be bothered with all the angry tones no matter who they are pointed at. Snappy comments I skip past. But fair that the thread took the turn it did because people were perhaps being offended. But just serves for everyone to maybe realise what they were saying was offensive to people with different experiences than them and perhaps think twice in future! Same for the young girl in OPs original post. It seems on here people are so quick to try to prove that they are right instead of being open to having their perspective altered which is frustrating. It’s all just opinion and everyone is entitled to it. I previously would’ve thought it incredibly rare that people are grandparents at 49 but now I know it isn’t! I would still low key be offended by it though 😂

Well of course she’s going to see you as older if you are older. How old was she? If she is say 30, then yes that’s almost a 20 year gap. And her mother could be your age. It doesn’t mean anything. She may be use to grandparents being younger. Who knows?

Is this you on another post? Please don’t feel the need to get surgery over a comment, if this is you.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5345826-to-want-to-accept-that-sadly-i-look-older-than-my-age?page=2

I don’t think it’s anything to do with age, and I’m surprised people are bothered by that, I’d just rather not discuss the fact my daughter had medical issues and is highly unlikely to have children.

It can’t be average because the average age of a first time mum is 30 or 31.

It can be quite upsetting, if you wanted, but don't have DC or if you have DC who for one reason or another don't have and are unlikely to have DC of their own. A subject best left alone, unless the other person talks about GC.