To think that society should support women to have children early in adult life

[ReallyTired]

Babies born to older mothers have a higher risk of special needs, it is harder to concieve after 35 and there are more likely to be complications with giving birth and pregnancy. It is far easier to give get pregnant and birth at 25 than 40.

Unfortunately women are under huge pressure to put off childbearing until their late thirties because its very hard to build a career after children. I feel that there should be more help for mothers returning to the workplace after children and stronger legistation to combat age discrimination. Ie apprenticeships should be open to mothers returning/ starting out in the work place as well as under 25s. I would like more help to allow mothers to have career breaks and return to the work place.

Surely its easier to change the attitudes of employers than basic biology. (Ie. its far easier to have a challenging career starting in your 40s than to start a family.

I had my DSs in my late thirties, not because of career considerations but because I was having a blast and babies, whilst wonderful in their way, aren't exactly compatible with free-lance headonism ... I don't regret it for an instant.

Your original post is a load of patronising drivel, by the way.

good lord NO - I wouldn;t give up my 20's for ANYONE I had a fucking ball

met DH at 30 - by 38 I had 3 kids - none of them have 2 heads ...why would I change that?

Gathering Sure. But you have to agree that if someone is emotionally not ready to have children, then its best to wait until they are in that place? Thats not just for the female, its for the male as well.

The term irresponsibility is used slightly tongue in cheek, although in fairness I would of been a shoddy parent, as would my husband, had we had children in our twenties, regardless of what support was in place.

The world you talk about seems to be one of the old days, where people didn't travel, extended family lived in the next street, looked out for each others children, no tvs, no mobile phones, travelling around the same country reasonably unusual. The times were undoubtedly good in their own ways, but i prefer the freedoms that the world has to offer now.

Or maybe sone commune set up where people look out for each other and live together as a large extended family?

Or are you talking about a scenario where childcare is far cheaper to allow families ( not just women) to have more freedoms? Because i don't really see how that would be possible either. Childcare workers need to be paid out a decent wage, subsidies still come out of the public pot, theres only so much to go round really.

Tell me how you see this utopia and how it would work in practice? You talk about a dream, outline for me the hard facts on how it would work.

I do have something to say actually - i had my first DD at 19, i wasnt emotionally read, i fucked it up, big time - i had my second when i was 35 and i am a much better mother this time around. I feel really guilty about this actually. OP, you are talking from your behind.

I had my third child at 40

I was worried about my age but the midwife said I was fitter than most 20 year olds as never smoked rarely drink and have bmi of 24

He is 4 and can read and write

People don't always have a choice in when they have children I did not concieve until 36 after 12 years of trying

marriedinwhite - If you really thought life as a SAHM with small children was rewarding and fabulous, I cannot imagine what your life was like pre-kids. No offense.

CoteDAzur - it was different. It was better with small children because I had realised my dreams and couldn't believe how much I loved them and how much I enjoyed being with them.

Pre children: own home, lots of travel, smart clothes, well groomed, good social life but disciplined because I had to be at work at 7.30am, exciting, deal driven.

Post children: relaxed, happy, jeans and jersey, fab holidays on the beach in Cornwall, Tumble Tots, Baby Group, ran a Sunday School, time to chat and relax and make new friends and get to now neighbours and all in a fug of unconditional love.

I wouldn't want my DCs to have DCs before their late 20s at the very earliest.

cote I do find life with small children rewarding and fabulous, and tiring and frustrating too. I get what you mean about life stopping, i think in the fish finger years it certainly does, well for me ( and dh) anyway. Well, not stopped exactly, but very different to anything else. Its a lovely time, but theres no time for anything else much at all. Im assuming this is what you mean?

I loved life at home with babies and small DCs - nothing better- but I had done lots of things first.

I love it too, i'll miss it when they've gone to school, sad times, but its damn hard work too.

gathering - re "Cote a. factually, it isn't: you are still very much alive"

Penetrating observation

"it just doesn't fit with certain modern conceptions"

"Modern conceptions" like a woman's right to live her life as she sees fit rather than be quickly married off and immediately start making babies? I wouldn't change them for the world.

"What could we do differently? Imagine putting all that effort into changing society to be more women-with-children shaped"

Do you actually have children? You can change society however you like, babies will still stay up crying all night and their parents will still be too knackered to do anything but sleep as early as they can. And they will need to sleep early and wake with sunrise. So unless your social engineering project includes babies being raised away from families in a Brave New World-like scenario, I don't see how parents of babies and young children will be free to live for themselves.

We don't live for ourselves once we have babies, and that is as it should be. I'm just grateful that I had over a decade of travel, experience, work and intellectual fulfillment, extreme partying, and doing pretty much whatever the hell I wanted to do before I settled down and had my babies.

I had my first child at 33, simply because I didn't meet anyone I wanted to stay with for the rest of my life, until I was 32, though I had been in long term relationships.

My career has taken off since I had children, it hasn't really hindered me at all. In fact having to pay the bills made me more determined to succeed.

I wouldn't have had children just for the sake of it in my early twenties. I really enjoyed the freedom I had at that age and was not ready to settle down. Having a parent who remarried and the problems and conflicts with step children and now step grandchildren, really makes me want to stay with one person for life tbh and I was lucky I found someone suitable.

I'm 10 years older than my DH - if I'd had my DS by the time I was 25, I would've had to give birth in a sex offenders unit...

Noqontrol I don't have any answers! Sorry. I'm really just trying to provoke myself, and anyone else who can be bothered, to think about it. I do think that undoing the private childcare model would have a hand in loosening things up, though.

And no, I'm not thinking about a world of yore, I really am thinking about a world of international travel. We have this amazing technological world (well, some of us do) with all these resources - why aren't they women-with-children shaped??

I'm also pondering about a society that equates adulthood and freedom with a childless male, to be blunt. That constructs spaces to revel, explore, and enjoy this model of adulthood that are not child-friendly, and thus not women-with-children friendly. I suspect there is a weird anti-mother dynamic at play in that. Perhaps, in the West, in the sixties, when "we" started to construct a leisure society that democratised the privileges that used to be available only to upper class men, there was a weird adolescent, "I hate my parents" vibe going on, and it stuck. Maybe it'll all be there.

It just strikes me, actually as I read and write on this thread, that it is quite fertile woman hating. Ladies are welcome to join in with all this fun and hi-jinks, but only so long as they are not mothers, or they leave their hideous "motherness" at the door.

I think that's quite odd.

Oddly enough I got preggers quicker and gave birth easier in my late thirties, then my late twenties.

Noqontrol - Yes, that is what I was saying. I would think any parent would understand.

I had dc in mid and late 20's and late 30's. Doesn't make any difference to me. Its up to the woman when they want children, not society in general anyway.

It makes the assumption that people can choose and you happen to have met the right person and are able to afford it when young - neither applied to me.

Isn't divorce a lot more common for people marrying in their 20s? Not great for the kids.

"I really am thinking about a world of international travel. We have this amazing technological world (well, some of us do) with all these resources - why aren't they women-with-children shaped??"

Because international travel with small children is something best avoided?

"I'm also pondering about a society that equates adulthood and freedom with a childless male, to be blunt. That constructs spaces to revel, explore, and enjoy this model of adulthood"

Why do you think women wouldn't and/or don't want to enjoy those things? Aren't you being sexist?

"It just strikes me, actually as I read and write on this thread, that it is quite fertile woman hating"

Excuse me, but some of us were quite the fertile turtles up to and including our early 40s. I had mine at 34 & 38, easily. It is not "fertile woman hating" to say that waiting until then to be a mother allowed me to work, travel, explore, party. And you know what, it was fantastic.

"I think that's quite odd"

Not really, just the natural progression of things. But you're a bit odd.

Cote - "You're still alive". I know that sounded stupid but here's the thing: It's so easy to see that time with children as "dead time", as the end of "having a life", or as time "outside of life". You did it yourself in your post, you said that when a woman has children, her life is effectively over - for a bit.

I've done it myself. I moaned on to a psychologist about how I had "done nothing" for ten years, while the children were small. He pointed out that I quite clearly hadn't done nothing: I'd been too busy to do many other things, my life had left me exhausted in that period. I re-phrased my moan to say that I hadn't been involved in socially-recognised or immediately remunerated work, and that my most intense social relationships had been with young children, who I was rearing to become independent of me ... and so on, and so forth.

I just find it interesting that even I slip into conceptualising it as "not-life", when it so evidently isn't.

I am no "back-to-the-home" advocate. Far from it. While I do love being a mother, I also find it does not fully satisfy me existentially. Hence my continual pondering on the question of why it is constructed as such an either/or - for women.

And I don;t like the way that "we" are currently offered the answer as lying in paid work. Apparently, becoming happy workers in a partially reconstructed capitalist society is going to be the panacea for all our existential woes. Somehow, I think not. for a start, a lot of that work is actually a bit soul destroying and crap. We don't all get the luxury of marvellous careers. So, I think that, too, is a bit narrow.

I'd like to think that we have the capacity to actually get to work on how motherhood, parenting itself is malleable, and can be conceived differently.

Having said that, I personally would be blinking happy with a few changes that make it easier for women-with-children (such as myself) to get jobs - even the slightly unappealing, job-not-career jobs. It may not be the whole answer (what ^could) be the whole answer? Nothing. Because life is complex, and changes), but it works for quite a few of us.

Cote - Why is international travel with children best avoided?

Small DCs are not in the least interested in International travel - they don't even care about the weather. They are much happier in a beach at home in wellies!

I think society does glorify and promote men in particular living like teenagers well into their 30s or later. Women are "allowed" to do this too, but the risk is we end up childless not by choice.

I see this as a negative of the delayed maturity that is a mix of social, economic and demographic factors. But you could argue it makes sense to delay the milestones of life such as family, meaningful career and financial security when we can all expect to live and work much longer than earlier generations. Too bad about women's biology in that case.