experiments

by rantywoman

First of all, three kids– good grief!  Second– five grand a month for day care!

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/12/10/older_parenthood_is_waiting_longer_to_have_kids_a_feminist_triumph_or_a.html

Not sure her reasoning adds up here… I mean, she could have saved the money for a real wall during those childless years:

So I’m not complaining. But you know what I am doing? I’m wishing. I’m wishing we had started popping out those kids, oh, say, five years earlier than we did, so that maybe, by 40, my bedroom and my sons’ bedroom wouldn’t be separated by a fake wall.

I definitely feel like stress from overwork has taken its toll on me:

Sociologists have devoted many man-hours to demonstrating that older parents are richer, smarter, and more loving, on the whole, than younger ones. And yet the tragic irony of epigenetics is that the same wised-up, more mature parents have had longer to absorb air-borne pollution, endocrine disruptors, pesticides, and herbicides. They may have endured more stress, be it from poverty or overwork or lack of social status. All those assaults on the cells that make sperm DNA can add epimutations to regular mutations.

For several reasons, though, I’m unsure the following is such a terrible thing.  For one thing, seeing one’s child get to his or her late thirties/ forties is getting to see them become an adult.  For another, that child may be ready by middle-age to collect his or her inheritance before he or she gets too old for it to make a big difference (hate to be blunt, but there it is):

A mother who is 35 when her child is born is more likely than not to have died by the time that child is 46. The one who is 45 may have bowed out of her child’s life when he’s 37. The odds are slightly worse for fathers: The 35-year-old new father can hope to live to see his child turn 42. The 45-year-old one has until the child is 33.