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.

Even his DS, who is older had it easier.

i never said it is easy and i think it is harder now. we had cvs tho, they are basic arent they? they were certainly part of what we were taught to do at school! ie gcse tho i am younger than you :)

it is much harder to get a job, any job at the moment, but if you are prepared to suck it up and do crappy agency work then there can be some stuff out there. the problem with it is that it isnt secure etc and that makes it even harder, and many people cant do it. we made it work, but yes we struggled at times.

tbh being young is pretty sucky for anyone with the economy as it is and i dont know what will change that.

...can society provide fabulous men who want to commit and have kids at the age of 25?....

...thought not...

..also, as a fortysomething...I don't know many fortysomethings who feel like what they really want in life is a marvellously challenging new career!! I'd quite like less hours, less responsibility etc personally

Snurk at what givemeaclue said.

So true.

I am older-we didn't have CVs because we didn't need them-you could walk into jobs and therefore we could afford to have children younger.

Shh givemeaclue-don't let Xenia hear you say that!

Sorry-I tend to assume that everyone has come across Xenia-maybe you haven't.

I am an older mother, with a career I was well-established in before I married DH, and now we both have choices we couldn't ever have had if we'd have met early and had children when we were young. It's about choice. Always is.

I was talking about this to a colleague the other day, who is exactly the same age as me. She had her children around 19-20, so they are now adults, and thought that once they'd left home, she'd be able to go places, holidays etc while she was young enough to enjoy them.

She didn't think about grandchildren! Now she has two of them the same age as my DS, and so is having to do (some of) it again anyway.

"She didn't think about grandchildren! Now she has two of them the same age as my DS, and so is having to do (some of) it again anyway."

Granparents don't have to do anything. I think it must be lovely to have granchildren. You can enjoy the company of a two year old and then give them back when they become annoying or need their nappy changed.

I think you are mixing up two completely different subjects - women are marrying later because as a society the expectation that people marry in their early twenties and immediately start a family has gone. In the face of increasing divorce rates and escalating cost of living it makes sense for professionals (both male and female) to wait to start a family until they have:

a) met the right person to start a family with
b) is financially secure enough to support a family

I agree that there is no framework in place to support women back into the workplace following the birth of their children whatever their age - flexible working and part time roles / job sharing are still a rarity. I know countless professionally skilled women, many of them graduates, (myself included) who are not in a position to work because the cost (financial or emotional) to their families is too high. Kicking off a career takes a huge commitment in terms of time and effort, imo many women with young children simply do not have the resources available to them to commit that much time and effort to work.

These days most of my friends seem to be used for childcare so it isn't a question of handing them back!

I've not read all the posts, just the first couple of pages.

Ok so you are saying that is it 'better' to have a baby in your early 20s as it's the best time biologically etc etc.
A woman 'chooses' to have a baby over develping a career etc.

However, the crucial factor missing is a (willing) MAN. When I was 23 none of my male friends were getting married or contemplating babies, it was the last thing on their minds...and mine & my female friend's too!

Partly why women have children later is purely from not meeting the right man til later, or women in their 20s desperate to get married/start a family are with a man of the same age who runs a mile at the mere suggestion.

Just my musings, but I think that a woman aged 25 is 'probably' better off with a man 5 or 10 years older as he is much more likely to be ready & willing to take the step towards marriage & kids.

A man at 25 is much less likely to be at that point, in this day and age anyway.

Yes this may be a sweeping statement but I believe that there are really strong elements of truth that cannot be denied.

Last point- newspaper articles, good old Daily Bigot being a prime example, berate women but running stories about selfish career women who have left up too late to have a baby, struggling to conceive, needing IVF- as if they brought all this on themselves and 'chose' not to have a baby in their early 20s.

Nobody every addresses the male side of things, that maybe the woman wasted her time with commitment-phobes who were never going to marry them/have kids with them.

I think this is a really important aspect which rarely gets mentioned- it's always as if the woman 'chooses' to wait til she is 38 to try and have a baby, as if there are no other factors involved apart from her own selfishness.

I had dd1 - aged 25,
ds1 - aged 35 and
dd2 - aged 41. dd2 has a genetic disability, passed on from me. I never in any moments considered it was because of my age. Although my extremely helpful mother did say 'well i thought she'd have downs syndrome' . I know people who have children with this particular condition from their twenties to their forties. As to the 'right time' to have children, well, I've tried the whole spectrum -it's exhausting in every decade!

There's also the fact that women may have observed what happens to their friends who marry men who agree to commit and even to have children but then don't do any of the fucking work.

In general, whoever said that affordable/free 24/7 childcare would be the best thing for everyone was absolultely right. Very, very few people are really happy to be with little children 24/7, no matter how much they love their own. Just about everyone is considerably better off mentally for having a good chunk of leisure time every week. Unfortunately it's still too commonly believed that any available leisure time in a family with children belongs to the man - he gets his nights out, his hobbies, his 'time to wind down' after work, the woman is just expected to cover all the domestic chores and childcare because she doesn;t have a paid job.

I think the man's age is definitely an isue. ANother of my friend,s same age as me, is desperate for children, but her husband is 35 and still not ready.

I was 29 with my first, and Dh 39. Maybe some pressure needs to be put on men to grow up.

I fancied knew my dh for 4 years before he plucked up the courage got round to asking me out. We married a year later and had ds1 a year after that, making me 34 rather than 28.

Whilst I would have welcomed the State booting him up the arse in those early days, I'm not quite sure how that could have been achieved. Would I have had to ring a special number ("Hello? I've found THE ONE...."). Or would they only have been obliged to provide me with a vial of fresh sperm?

Sorry if this thread is supposed to be serious but I just can't see it like that...

Why do we need "society" to support us in how we chose to live our lives?

solidgold if there were 24/7 free good quality childcare for anyone to use, you can bet your bottom dollr MN would be full of posters bragging about how they didn't use it .

This thread will bang up a lot of

'Young women get pregnant so they can go on benefits' ignorant crap , won't be much intelligent discussion here.

I think women should supported in starting families when they want.

I had DD (unplanned and single) when I was 19 and I feel there was quite a lot of practical/financial support offered, but lots of criticism from individuals and pressure for a termination.

There were some advantages in being a parent at that age - I functioned well on hardly any sleep, my pg and birth were very easy and my body recovered easily. Emotionally I think I was more mature than average and was never interested in getting drunk or partying, so I don't feel I missed out on any of that.

I got support from additional student funding, childcare grants, tax credits and social housing, so there was no reason for it to interfere with returning to education and building a career. I got a degree and did some postgrad qualifications and there was plenty of support for that (I won a scholarship for my postgrad, partly due to my LP status). Studying whilst DD was small was ideal as it was quite flexible and a couple of times I had to ask for deadline extensions, but that was no problem - not so easy to do if you are in a real workplace.

I returned to the workplace just a few years later than my peers as some of my study was p/t, but overall I was in a better position than many of my peers, since I had the security of my own flat, less debt (as student parents can get benefits during vacations), and was able to do some volunteer work which helped with networking, compared to others who just had to work in bars and takeaways before getting a graduate job. I had lots of help with childcare from my parents who were only in their 40s when DD was small, and am able to focus pretty well on my job and often stay late now that DD is a fairly independent teenager, while my colleagues who are my age often have to rush out of meetings to pick up their young babies from nursery.

Well given that children are an investment in society's future, society should support parenthood by such means as affordable childcare and an encouragement to businesses to lose the pointless 'presenteeism' culture, whatever age women conceive and bear their children.

word

Vile OP.

I had my first child at 43 and it had absolutely nothing to do with "society" encouraging me to wait.

I think people make all sorts of choices for all sorts of reasons and I think that sometimes choices are taken away or opportunities don't arise til later.

I do know that I am sick and tired of the constant media babble that goes on doing exactly what the OP suggests and the constant assumption that it's to do with women waiting due to their careers

43 is young! :) Gives me lots of hope. hairytale

Sick of people being so down on older Mothers. It offensive.