to be really really angry that only women are once again being blamed for leaving having babies too late??

[littlestmummystop]

Where the feck is the man's responsibility in all this??

A straw poll of my friends. . . 4 out of 6 felt broody and wanted babies in their 20s despite all also having great jobs. None of their boyfriends also in their twenties were 'ready' so none of them did.

I had a baby at 24, then my exP decided he was too young to be a dad ( at 28) so he left. I've been a single parent since.

So what are women supposed to do? Make ultimatums, have a baby earlier and risk being a single parent? Or leave it till their menfolk are 'ready' to settle down, which among the middle class lot appears to be around 35, and then risk leaving it too late? Why are women being solely blamed for this??

YABU

Women should recognise the limitations of their physiology. If, knowing this, they choose to delay motherhood then that's a risk they take. If they actually want children in their 20s then they should be damned sure to only hook up with potential long-term partners who are likely to want the same thing as them.

I have a large group of university-educated friends in their early 30s. Some are starting to have children now. I don't know any where it hasn't been their choice AND their partner's to wait. I was seen as odd by practically everyone professionally and socially for having my family in my mid 20s. It's just not something people in my social group do, and consequently my uni friends are years and years behind in terms of having kids, whereas my friends with kids are basically 5 or actually closer to 10 years older than me. When I was looking for a partner at university I simply didn't go out with people who didn't share the same outlook as me. We married shortly after leaving uni and talked seriously about starting a family from our wedding onwards.

Obviously it's different if you don't meet someone you want to settle down with, but if you choose someone who doesn't want the same things as you, then that's got to at least in part be your own responsibility. I still think the decade from aged 20 to aged 30 is a pretty long time to find a suitable partner if you look actively.

Women I know who have settled down late (i.e. married at around 30, kids often some years after that) weren't looking to settle down in their 20s. They saw that as their decade for working themselves into the ground/travelling/partying etc etc. That's obviously fine, but they are taking a risk and can't change biology, so perhaps not that surprising if when at 35 they finally decide the time's right for the baby to be scheduled in then their ovaries won't co-operate.

Perhaps its more to do with the way society in general views children and parenthood, and the normal course of adult life? Children are seen as restricting and people talk about "getting their life back" after having them, rather than seeing children as a normal part of a relationship and something that's an integral part of your adult life. Hence all the parenting books carefully explaining how to get a baby to behave like a small machine and fit into the parents lives.

YANBU, Women's hour on Radio 4 had a phone in about this last year and I phoned in to make exactly the same point as you, and I got on the air . Makes me really mad, I actually think it is probably the main reason women put off having babies. My DB is nearly 36 and single but even he says that he would not want to start a family too quickly and is therefore restricting himself to looking for a significantly younger woman (no wonder he is single!). Bahh.
It took me about five years to convince DH but luckily I started quite young and so managed my first DS by 30 (an ultimatum I had set myself when I was about 18!).
Interestingly my Greatgrandmother waited until she was 39 because she couldn't find a man who was good (ie. holy) enough before then and then had two DCs.

But I don't see the situation as changing. The current generation are leaving university with large amounts of debt, will take most of their 20s to pay it back and then will try to get on housing ladder; many ppl will not financially be able to afford to have children until later. In fact, on the MW programme they reported that money was the no 1 reason why women chose not to have children earlier.

Yeah but it's easier for men to have babies late, isn't it? So it's true, no point being aggro about it.

Ah well the whole thing about men happily reproducing later for years is also in doubt one article here

I also read that when a man has substandard sperm, foetuses conceived can be less viable resulting in miscarriage. And that the miscarriage would be linked to the age of the man, but without medical investigation, "blamed" on the woman.

Actually, research has shown that that's a myth. Sperm are formed while the male is still in utero, and largely contain the characteristics of his mother, so the baby get's the grandmother's make-up. It depends therefore on the grandmother's age, and hence still comes back to the woman.

I thought sperm were continually formed and reabsorbed if not used...

Surely if men were born with all the sperm they would use in their lifetime they would have to have texticles the size of houses?

I didn't wait to get on the housing ladder to start a family with DH, in fact we had to move in with PILs for 4 months then borrow a flat, we bought our first flat when DS1 was one year old. I don't know why people think they have to have everything just right before they have a baby, for well educated people in good jobs they seem very underconfident in their ability to cope with life changes, babies are very flexible and portable.
I am also remembering with horror a male flatmate who announced (this was 15 years ago) that it was impossible to raise a family on less than £80,000, DH and I have still not reached this figure but have 3 DCs.

I completely agree with wigglybeezer. The middle classes seem to have these ideas about life needing to be 'just so' before embarking on parenthood. It's perfectly possible to live your life, earn money, heck even get promoted whilst you are having your family . I'm pretty sure there actually is no 'right' time no matter how long you wait.

YANBU.

Ceilidhgirl, you are being a bit simplistic and condemnatory here. I'm 36 and don't have kids yet, but like a lot of women in the same boat, it's not because I thought it was inconvenient when I was younger and wanted to party and climb the job ladder till I was older, blah, blah. As I said earlier, and loads of woman have also said, we have been in relationships with men throughout our 20s who told us we were going to start a family - but who then kept putting it off ad infinitum till we ended up mid-30s and without kids. Being lied to and being messed around is different from sticking with someone who doesn't want kids but you think they'll change. I would've loved to have started my family in my 20s and the same goes for all my friends of the same age who are childless. You were lucky to find the right man for you who didn't keep putting off baby-making, so you should be sympathetic to people who didn't. I speak for all my friends in saying that not a single one of us has ever thought, when we younger or now, that a baby is something we wanted to schedule into our lives as something desirable but inconvenient. We all think of starting a family as something that would be the start of our life proper, not an interruption to it. This is an insulting and thoughtless presumption people who've not had any problems with creating a family make.

That's a response to your first post, mainly. My bad.

Obviously only you know your situation. I doubt all people who have children late find themselves in exactly the same situation, however. I cannot imagine tolerating a partner who messed me about and lied to me, and I wouldn't want to marry or have kids with someone who treated me like that.

Oh, and how do you know I had no problem creating a family? Just because I had children in my mid 20s doesn't mean that they were easy to conceive .

I am like CG. I had my first children quite young and I know no one from my social group who did. My sbilings' children are a generation younger than my first children. I was married at 21 and had our first just before I turned 23.

But for me having children was a total priority (as well as my career) so I worked on that. I was 14 when I was reading NCT leaflets about birth positions.

Also any woman in her 20s wanting babies young just needs to marry a man in his 30s may be as one solution who is ready to settle down. Then if you wait to find someone until your 30s you'll find many men are after women in their 20s.

Or have them without a man. Men are superfluous in this if you choose them to be. My sister who of course also works chose to have her children by IVF alone.

Ceilidhgirl - I have mixed feelings about what you are saying, or at least the way in which you inflect it, but one point on which I completely agree is the idiocy of the "finding the right time" question where right time is assumed to = "will have least impact on my life". Idiotic because a. if you have kids, whether you are 18 or 43 you will spend a vast amount of time with them at the expense of doing other things - maybe completely pointless things like doing up the kitchen for the nth time or playing video games, but still it is silly to pretend that you can strategically schedule them so the rest of your life can be as if you haven't had them; and b. why on earth would you have kids without accepting, no, embracing, that they are going to change things? I got pregnant when I thought I may well not and I said to DP, "If we can't have children then something else huge has to change: I can't carry on like this indefinitely". I am delighted that I am not the person I was before and never will be again. It doesn't mean my life is over, but the opposite.

So agree with this, it takes two to tango...

There is an extension to this that also pisses me off, which is the whole "women with families struggle to find a work/life balance". That two part tv programme with WOMEN dashing about, fraught, anxious, pulled in two different directions - where were the fathers? So few men are part time, so few men seek a job that is within school hours, etc etc.

We are never going to solve either of these problems by only focussing the debate of women.

Xenia, I absolutely love the idea of you reading NCT leaflets at 14. That is very funny (but I would expect no less of you as you are probably the most goal-focused person I have ever 'met').

I wanted kids from about the age of 28 onwards. Before that I was adamant that I never wanted any at all and was extremely careful with contraception etc. My mother had four pregnancies entirely by accident so I foolishly felt that getting pregnant was probably rather easy. In my late twenties, I began a relationship with someone who was in his early twenties. What with one thing and another, it took until my mid-thirties before he was ready to have children. I found getting pregnant extremely difficult despite no actual fertility issues, have one daughter who I feel incredibly lucky to have, hope for another baby and think I probably won't get one.

I was not 'putting off having children'. In common with many others on this thread, I wanted them from earlier on but was not in a position to get pregnant or indeed to look after those children adequately from a financial point of view, as at that point I was working in just about the most spectacularly unchildfriendly job it is possible to have. Had I had children at 28, I would probably have been pretty much on the breadline. I could not have continued to work in the field I was in without a huge amount of support from family etc (who simply weren't there to offer it).

As to choosing a man in his thirties when you want kids in your twenties, isn't that a rather weird and excessively pragmatic way to behave? Surely you pick the person, not his or her readiness to settle down and procreate? I find the idea of picking a partner purely in order to have children more than a little odd.

I know a lot of women around my age (40) whose partners have delayed and delayed having children until it becomes a real problem, if not with fertility issues then with the relationship itself and many of them were with older men. I don't know anyone, so far, who has not eventually had a child when they desperately wanted one, fortunately, although in some cases it was rather expensive.

I do really hate these articles about how it is all women's fault. I think it is far more about men wanting to prolong the bachelor lifestyle than it is about women wanting to put off motherhood too long.

I must say, if I had my time again, I'd probably not bother with contraception at all after university and have whatever kids turned up at whatever age I was with whoever I was with at the time. I so wish I could have had a big family and as it is I probably can't even give my daughter a brother or sister.

I think that whilst some of the problem lies in men who don't want to commit to having children I also think that some of it relates to woimen who are ultra-picky about who their Mr Right is. I see this with a friend of mine and I wonder if she;s actually a bit afraid of commitment/intimacy but hides it behind the faults that she finds in the men that she meets.

I love dp dearly but when I was very aware that for me a huge plus point of him was that he wanted to ttc at the same time that I did (late 20's). I wasn't sure that we would always be together and I knew that he wasn't perfect but I did think that he was the right person for me to have children with (and other aspects of our relationship were good). I was prepared, I think, to accept a bit more risk in our relationship in order to have children at what felt like the right time of me.

As an aside about the young women going with much older men by contrast out of dp's friends the one who has always been clear that he didn't want kids, and split up with his girlfriend because of it, has now just got married to a 44 year old with teenage children with the clear understanding that whilst he is an active step-parent, and gets on well with his SC, they will not be having children together. So perhaps the young uncertain men should pair of with older women who don't want to ttc/can no longer ttc.

actually to correct an incorrect statement made by another poster - sperm are produced regularly by men throughout their lives - it's the woman that is born with the eggs she will have for her life.

I do think that there is a lot of waiting until everything is 'just so', but maybe that is a delaying tactic? In my circle the women with children had them when they were not 'in a position to 'look after those children adequately from a financial point of view' and everything worked out OK. I am in a one bed flat with a 19mo, but we will move soon, I knew that I wanted a child, dh and I discussed, and we went for it knowing that if we waited until we had a 3 bed house near a good school and savings in the bank it may be too late. I think it really helped that one on dh's friends had a baby very young, he could see we would be ok.

I do agree that the focus on women is wrong. Men should be more involved in all aspects of being a parent. Unfortunatly ultimately they can walk away, if they change their mind they can hook up with some twentysomething and have kids. I think that they miss out in being like this but women don't have this option.

The sole reason I am a mother of toddlers T 45 is that my dh wasn't ready at the same time as me,he is younger than me so that was a mitigating factor but even so it nearly cost us our relationship.I would love to have been a young mother-men just don't want babies when women need to have them.

It's not fair to blame the woman for having kids later in life.
If woman has child in her late teens then she is portrayed as a 'drain on society' and 'doing it to get a council flat'
Leave it too late and you may have to go for infertility which can cost thousands. Plus if you leave it really late say 50's they moan that you may not be able to care for them as well as a younger mum.

I had my first 2 in my early 20's and have just had another aged 32, acidentally. I could feel my 'biological clock' ticking and if I hadn't of got caught it would be 'ticking' at me for the next 10 years. Luckily dp was supportive of all pregnancies and has been a great dad.
Interestingly we stopped at 2 because he was satisfied with one of each. I was happy as well as he is such a good dad and i love him very much

Interestingly again I am the one doing contraception as he won't have the snip.
Maybe if men who said they never wanted kids had the snip then women wouldn't waste years on them hoping he will be ready one day

I haven't chosen not to have kids because I'm fussy about men. I've lived with 3 men, and none of them would commit to having kids, but were happy to have me as their girlfriend/wife. I'm okay to wash their pants and take care of them and love them, but not good enough to have their children.

I'm not some naive idiot either - they all made the right noises at the right times about commitment and kids (one insisted on marrying me!), but when it came to the crunch, they all fudged the issue.

There are some really wise comments on here about the problem lying with men's inability to grow up. That's my dad's theory on what has happened to me too.

I can't believe people are coming on here and saying 'well, I just thank my lucky stars I've had my kids, and I'm alright'.
That's like a knife through my heart! Okay, honestly, how can you possibly think it's okay to say that on a forum where clearly there will be a number of childless women who are very sad about it?

Any ideas how it feels to be childless and privately so sad that you cry every day about it? I mean really howl, like an animal, but silently, so your 'beloved' other half doesn't hear? Every DAY.
The pain of a needlessly empty womb is shocking.
I have never done anything other than my best, I've been a good wife, I've tried my hardest, but I was conned. I mean, seriously betrayed, conned, strung along and lied to. My story is not unusual.

Ceilidhgirl - I agree with a couple of your points, but disagree with many more.

This comment in particular really astounds me...

By Ceilidhgirl on Fri 19-Jun-09 22:25:10
... I cannot imagine tolerating a partner who messed me about and lied to me, and I wouldn't want to marry or have kids with someone who treated me like that.

Do you really think that those of us who have been in that situation would have stayed if we thought we were being lied to at the time - hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Not to mention the fact that often the men do actually mean what they say at the time... so it's not a lie is it?? When you are discussing this very emotional topic with the man in your life and he's telling you that he does really want children and for them to be with you, but wants to wait until next year (for varied reasons which all sound quite plausible) and you love him and have been with him forever... you believe them - why wouldn't you.

I can understand how from the outside looking in, it might seem stupid - but really, you need to have been through this to understand - so instead of condemning you might want to be more sympathetic to those of us who have been through it and very grateful that you haven't. Life doesn't always go to plan - one day you might find that out yourself (but hopefully not) and then perhaphs you will find yourself with more compassion for people who are not so fortunate with their life plan.