Article in Metro about the increasing problems with couples delaying conception....

[SackAche]

....until late 30's/early 40's....

What d'you all think? I worry for my friends who are ALL of the mind "Well I can just have a baby at 35". I feel like saying to them that sometimes it just isn't that simple!

Amongst me and all my friends, it wasn't a matter of waiting. We all wanted to have had children much earlier. But couldn't find a male who was willing to act his age rather than his shoe size and didn't want to go solo.

When I got married at 21 to a university sweetheart, I admit we didn't talk kids much. It was more like one of those things that would happen in the future.

Yet when I got to be 28 and he was 32, he found he never wanted kids.

I wound up divorced. It took me till I was 31 to find a man who wanted marriage, a family, a home.

I wish I had been able to have kids earlier, but no joy.

it is interesting that the article is pointing out that women delay having their first baby for so long that the second (or maybe a wanted third) is very hard indeed to conceive.

My unattached friends are bricking themselves about it (we're all early 30's) .

Here we go again, the British blame-the-female phenomenon. Yes, it's b/c we all want 'careers' instead of kids. Bad women! Bad, nasty, selfish women. It's all their fault. Sigh.

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why cant you have a baby at 35?

I hope your BIL is reading the article, Pruni, not just your SIL.

I wish I'd checked that my husband was mature enough to have children before we did. Very wise to do so Expat.

And I had my kids at 35 and 40. I know that it's not necessarily useful to quote a single experience but I know I'm far from unique.

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I had ds at 23, was on pill total shock
dp and I tried for dd in 2001 (I was 31) got pregnant within that first week of trying
Tried again 2003 after dd was 6 mths old
Nothing, one ectopic, one tube out, various problems, irregular cycles.
I'm now 35 and know it will be an uphill struggle and not sure I am able to do it tbh now...

Hang on folks!!!! STEP BACK! It didn't say ANYTHING about career women!!! It was couples in general. And did talk about decreasing fertility in men too. Thats what interested me so much, the fact that it wasn't a working woman-bashing article. It was in the Metro.

SackAche, it's great to hear that at last somebody has cottoned on to the reality that, for most educated women, finding a man who wants to have children rather than extend his adolescence to his forties is quite tricky.

I didn't wait until my thirties to have kids because I was so enjoying my career/the high life. It was because I only met a proper grown-up man at 29, similar to expat.

Good on them for not going down the usual blame road.

wessexgirl - I suppose what saddens me about my friends is that 2 of them REALLY want children. 1 wants them yesterday and pines for a baby.... but her DP of 5 yrs says he's not ready and wants to wait a few more years.... the other has made the decision that she can wait until her mid-thirties then just produce on demand!

I feel sorry for the 1st friend coz its really getting to her (have posted on here in the past about her).
As for the 2nd friend I get quite annoyed at her blase attitude about it all.

We all have our careers established and are all in longterm relationships.... and I'm the youngest at 27, they are 30.

I KNOW that its not always choice. But whether you choose to wait or not it doesn't alter the facts.

A pal of mine - who ironically was in a long-term relationship w/my ex husband's best friend -also wanted kids desperately but her man was of the 'I want to wait a few years' mentality.

She went back and forth for 2 years, but then decided that he was entitled to want to wait, then she was entitled to walk.

So she did.

No, she never had kids in the end - she's in her 40s now, BUT she still feels good about the decision to leave 'Bob' b/c she felt like she was getting the control to have kids or not back.

Dunno. That's sort of how the ex and I felt about it. It was going to cause untold resentment on either side no matter how it shook out, so we called it a day. Hard. Painful.

But in the end, the best decision the two of us ever made.

Expat - Did he eventually go to have kids?

Nope, Sack. He never did. He's 43 now, never been married, never wants to be.

D'you think he's gay?

No, he's DEFFO not gay. He's just one of those blokes who never wants to get married of have kids. He's living with some gal now who feels ths same and is very happy. His ex, Alison, is married to a man - in his late 40s to her 41 - who has grown up kids.

My ex is remarried to a woman who never wanted kids and had her tubes tied before she'd ever met him. Which was good b/c he had a vasectomy at 34.

I do think there are a lot of folks out there nowadays who, for one reason or another, never want kids.

Well, I have to say I feel like a statistic. DH and I did not start trying for a baby earlier than now (me 34, him 35) due to me not actually wanting my own family until now (he has always really wanted kids). Over the last year or so a lot of things have changed in my life, and it's only now that I have felt ready to cope with children of my own. Amusingly, my career was one thing that didn't factor into the decision at all - I've never been a career woman, and if the time had been right for me to have kids earlier, I would have done it without thinking about my career!

I always watched my friends who had fertility issues, and I would think to myself "it would be just my luck that as I've decided not to have kids, I would be super-fertile if I ever started trying". It was a bit of a shame that didn't turn out to be the case.

However, the media publicity did make me aware of the fact that I would find things more difficult at my age, which made me do more research into what I could do to help the process along. This means that I have been temp charting from the start, have changed my diet, am looking to join a gym to get some exercise when we get home from holiday. This has meant that my problem with a short luteal phase has been diagnosed within a very short period of time, and is being acted on by my GP very fast.

Hugs,
Artoo.

Yes ... it's a mans point that when you want a baby, wham bamm, and one is there ( or within six months)... so my DH has had a shock to discover that we are taking longer...
Delayed by the fact i never have felt old enough, i am still a child myself, so put myself on the depo injection. Takes two years to wear off... ( Nine months to go, till return of fertility ???!!)
Now with moving he has thought, oh well , lets put it off until we have moved then have one when settled..... Mmmmm , i laughed at him... So he thinks it is that easy, i am 34 he is 36 !! we both have reasonable bad average diets, consisting of a take out a week and 2 - 3 bottle of wine per week each.... mens perseption is very amusing...

a friend of mine ( 33) has asked to be steralized for her birthday present this year. She has no kids and doesn't want them. that's one way of getting the point over !