Husband wants to put off having children, but I'm getting older...

[annalisa2g]

I'm 32, have been married for a few years and am ready to start a family. The difficulty is that my husband, who is a year younger, wants to put off having children for a few more years for financial reasons. We are currently saving for a house deposit, although we own an apartment that is rented out in another part of the country. I earn substantially more than my husband and my work maternity leave policy is the bare statutory minimum. So, if I were to become pregnant our income would be hit very hard.

I understand the practicalities of waiting to have a child and saving for a few more years, but at the same time I worry that delaying starting a family could lead to fertility problems. My friends have began to have children and I have two wonderful nephews whom I love. I feel that I am wasting my time working in an office when really I want to be a mother. Would it be wrong for me to push the point with my husband or should I let things rest for a few more years until he feels the time is right?

I'd be very interested to hear what others think about this.

Could he not consider staying at home with the child? It is a difficult one - but it needs to be really talked through - you don't want to end up resenting him....

Can you have one of those fertility tests? Might push you into making a decision, either way?
FWIW I don't think there is ever the "right" time to have a baby. I understand where your husband is coming from regarding finances, but 32 sounds like a really good age to have a baby. I left it later - 1st at 37, 2nd at 39, and would have loved to have had them younger (I didn't meet anyone I wanted to have children with until I met dh and we had them quite quickly after committing to each other!). It is tiring and I think I would cope better if I was younger, plus I will be a very old grandmother if I ever get to be one. However, financially we were in a really good place to have them so it is horses for courses.....
Good luck with your decision, it's a tough one!

Is part of the problem your job; d'you want to do something different with work as well as (or even instead of!) having children?

They do rather knacker your life and your energy levels - and, often, your earning capacity too, kids.

If you both want kids I wouldn't put it off to be honest. You don't know how long it will take you to conceive (I had no fertility problems but it still took us 18 months!)

I would push the point with your husband - yes it should be a joint decision that you are both happy with, but you say he does want kids at some point so you need press on with it really!

I don't think he would want to stay at home as he is very traditional. I would also love to be at home, so I suppose we are both traditional in that way. In an ideal world, perhaps he feels that in a few more years he will have a promotion and be able to support a family. We have talked about it, but I haven't pushed the point yet. Maybe we should talk about it more.

Well, it probably is worth checking out your fertility. You may have masses of time. I got pregnant at 37 after one contraceptive slip-up

Thank you all for the advice. The fertility test is a good idea and I'll look into it.

You own an apartment? why not just sell it and use that for a deposit? Or am I missing something here?
Do you really want to be approaching retirement age when your children finally leave home?

I should have been more clear- we have a mortgage on an apartment, we don't own it outright. We aren't wealthy by any stretch but probably better off than a lot of people. However, the reason we are better off is because of my income. But money is less important to me than having a family. The difficulty is that it isn't up to me, I really want having children to be a joint decision.

what malificence said. You've got an asset, you both have jobs, you DO have a maternity leave allowance, you want to be a mother... I think you need to know exactly what level of financial security he would regard as 'enough'. He is right that having children can bring you to your knees financially, it's fair to consider his fears, but I think at your age you need to have some deadlines.

Would you resent him very much if you both went back to work after the minimum leave? Would that be so bad?

Don't panic. At 32 you have plenty of time in my opinion. At least another couple of years before anything like an age related deterioration of fertility. Do you think he is putting it off because he doesn't want to have kids at all/with you? That is a different matter.

Agree with motherinferior - do you think you'd be happier/more prepared to wait if you changed jobs? 32 sounds quite early to be making decisions on biological-clock grounds.

If you are starting to consider it, why not think about downsizing your lifestyle to live on the one salary and see how it is realistically? You then get the added bonus of saving all your salary to speed up the deposit situation. If that is 'impossible' you need to think seriously that this is what you are asking DH to commit to permanently. Is there any way you can change your plans for the future to accomodate the loss of your salary? How important is it for you to have two properties? Would you work part time after maternity leave? Is there any way you could transfer your skills to work from home? If you can show your DH a way through the financial puzzle, you will be able to assess whether his hesitancy is based on finances or something else.

toddleramas idea is a good one, I think.

I wouldn't leave it much longer to try, tbh, it could take a year or two to conceive, then 9 month pregnancy - having your first at 35 would be a bit late imo.

One of the rules of having children is that now isnt the right time and, no, you cant afford it. However that can be applied at any time. Now will never be the right time and you can never afford children until you have them and discover that going without isnt so difficult.

The difficulty for women is that on average fertility does decline in our 30s. For some women they will be fine for longer. For other women their fertility falls off a cliff. The problem is that you wont know which is you until you try.

If your dh is anything like mine then he may need a countdown to trying, and rational reasons why it is best to be now not later. So I had to go through the cost for him to prove we could afford it and then say let's save for 6 months then go for it. I also had to point out that although we could feasibly wait a few years before my fertility would plummet, we knew we wanted two and a nice gap between them so waiting now might mean we wouldn't get our 2nd child.

Just a thought, but I do find a lot of men read about women having babies at 40 and assume that means their partner will be able to - but they don't think about what it means having more than one.

Ask him how many children he wants, and then do the maths backwards. So if he wants three - and the last age you'd feel confident you'd definitely be able to get pregnant would be 39...

So 39 - minus 12 months TTC (more realistic for a woman in late 30s) = 38, minus 2 year gap between children (13 months + 9 months pregnancy) = 36, minus another 2 year gap = 34, minus 9 months for first pregnancy = 33 yrs 3 months, minus 6 months TTC = 32 years 9 months.

A fertility test might be a good idea. I had DCs at 38yrs and 40yrs and just got pregnant the first month of trying-no different from my first, at 30yrs-however you can't know these things.

The red flag for me here is "a few". That's so very unspecific that I would suspect someone who really doesn't want to rock the boat and have children any time soon.

Does he really understand how female fertility works? I have been astonished by the number of intelligent, well-educated thirtysomething men who genuinely think that a woman remains pretty much just as fertile until the menopause, when she suddenly stops being fertile. In reality, of course, it declines pretty steadily from a much earlier age than they think.

After starting TTC at the age of 31, it took over 5 years (and lots of agressive fertility treatments) before being lucky enough to have a successful pregnancy. I was rising 37 when I became a mother. We were 'unexplained' i.e. the doctors found nothing wrong, so a fertility test would have given us a false sense of security. The data shows that fertility does decline rapidly in your thirties, and especially after 35. Our mothers' generation (i.e. women having babies in the 1970s and 1980s) were regarded as elderly primigravida by the age of 27. Social norms may have changed but biology hasn't.

I don't think that fertility does follow the same pattern for all women. Mine worked exactly like that Tmesis, but I think that anyone would be silly to assume it, generally it does decline. If you are going to have problems then you need to start early. As it was at 39 we decided on a baby and bingo-no sooner said than done, but it was a bit late to assume this.

We were in the same financial position at 32 and decided that I should get over the next career hump before having children.

To cut a long story short, my husband's sperm are highly abnormal and we only have one child, by virtue of some v expensive and horrible IVF treatment. We had nine failed attempts for a second.

If we had discovered the problem earlier, we would have had longer beofre my fertility declined as well to sort it out.

Don't put it off

I think you just need to sit down with your DH and have a serious chat about it. See what his worries are - they may be legitimate or they may be due to the fact that he's worried about the prospect of actually having a child. Either way you need to set a firm plan about when it's going to happen. It really isn't fair for him to say "I'll be ready in a few years" which leaves you dangling and wondering when it's actually going to happen.

My husband and I have talked about children, when we first got married he was all up for children, but I wanted to wait as I wanted a little more time, I'm now nearly 30 and my husband is shy from 40 and now I am ready my husband has changed his mind and keeps making excuses from 'too expensive', not enough space, not old enough, and he wouldn't be able to game with his friends anymore, we are financial stable, have a mortgage, a spare bedroom, I pointed these out and he said we need to wait until we pay off the mortgage, which would put us in our 50s-60s I have asked if he has changed his mind but he still insists he wants to be a dad, he then acts like I have no idea how hard it may be and points out id have to change nappies (I work in care) and also helped bring up my younger siblings, I know how hard it would be, I jave explained ot doesn't have to be right now, but I wpuld like a timescale, im just getting scared now I'll never be a mam and it's really getting me down.

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