I’d like to talk about my own experience of having older parents, which wasn’t great. But I don’t want to upset those on here who are older parents themselves. I think society has changed a huge amount since I was young, in many ways 40 is far younger than it was in the 70s, and everyone is different. Some of the issues my parents had were theirs and theirs alone.
My sister and I were born when my mother was in her mid-40s and my father in his early 50s. I wasn’t at all conscious of it as a small child but as I went through school I got badly teased for it. (This is probably no longer the case.) We both felt adrift as our parents did not engage in pop music or fashion so we were always a bit out of it. The music in our house was wartime, and we listened to Radio 2 and show tunes.
Into our teenage years, it got worse. My mum was working full time and doing everything around the house. Because she’d grown up at a time when most women expected to do every bit of housework she let me and my sister be incredibly lazy as she assumed we’d then spend the rest of our lives doing it all and wanted us to have some freedom first. As a result, she was permanently exhausted. We were not easy teenagers and she struggled to relate to us in any way. She told me once she’d felt since she had children she’d only existed; I think her life was not at all what she’d expected. When we started our periods she didn’t want to discuss it and seemed resentful and very negative, and I have since found out that post-menopausal women can subconsciously have a very hard time when their own children start menstruating. In our mid-teens she died at 61, of something that, while sad to die of at that age, was also not at all unheard-of.
We were left with our father who was grumpy, retired, and drinking heavily after a lifetime of drinking pints every day in a way that was normal to his social circle. He announced that he was too old to parent us and disengaged. I carried on with academics, developed an eating disorder as I could barely cook and disliked the few things my father was able to make, and got out ASAP to university without ever really going home. My sister got involved in drinking and drugs, which he did nothing about, and although she has sorted herself to some extent, still struggles without any formal qualifications.
I spent very little time with my father after that, but after he died, I met one of his stepchildren from his first marriage, who is thirty years older than me. She remembers a fun, energetic man that I think I might have known as a toddler, but he became a grumpy old man for me.
I had no grandparents after the age of 15 and before that, although kind, the ones remaining were all over 80 and in poor health. All my cousins were 15-20 years older than me, other than two belonging to my mum’s much younger sister.
I know that so much of this comes down to who my parents were rather than their age. But their age contributed in many ways. I think the generation gap has closed dramatically - I was an 80s child with a father who had been an evacuee and then conscripted! - and it is no longer the norm at all to start your family before 30 in lots of places. I am now the age my mother was when I was born, and I have a vague grasp of current music, because of my kids, and while I remain oblivious to fashion, I can relate to the peer pressures my kids experience in a way my own parents can’t. I parent a teenager with special needs which is endlessly challenging and exhausting, and I can see how my mother struggled with everything she was doing and two (we now know) ND teenagers.
I’m sorry, this is incredibly long. I don’t normally comment on these sorts of thread but the age in the title perhaps triggered me a little. I grew up incredibly against older parents, but that’s changed quite a lot as I’ve aged myself. I just sometimes want to speak up when people see parenting as just the baby and toddler years.