Elusive Wapiti has written (and his commenter Unknown has responded):
http://elusivewapiti.blogspot.tw/2014/03/so-men-do-have-biological-clock.html
I’m entering my fourth decade, and one thing I’ve noticed about parenting infants is that it’s a lot harder now than it was when I was 27, when S1 was born, or even 34 when Mrs. Wapiti and I had S3. … Nowadays, I just don’t have nearly the energy; I appear to have found the upper limit on my heretofore seemingly limitless reserve of go-get-um.
… It is time now to discuss the other, well, biological clocks that apply to the human species, namely, menopause, and repeated quasi-scientific findings that women in their 30s and older have a greatly increased risk of conceiving children with genetic abnormalities.
To help quantify how big this “increased risk” really is, let’s put it this way–by the time women are in their 40s, their risk conceiving a child with birth defects surpasses that of cousin incest.
…We’ve known for a while that fathers in their 40s pose an increased risk of conceiving children with birth defects, or passing down defective recessive genes through their children that are expressed in their grandchildren. Added to this knowledge are recent studies that have been finding problems aren’t just physical, but mental. A Malaysian study in 2011, and a just-released 2014 study from Sweden both found that older dads (i.e., age 40 or greater) conceived children who were several times more likely, even an order of magnitude more likely, to have various psychological disorders and mental illness. Unfortunately, when one considers the steadily rising average age of the Western mother, the burgeoning cohort of women who give birth after age 35 (14% in 2008, undoubtedly higher now), and that fathers are typically a few years older than mothers, it seems like a great many men, yours truly included, are conceiving children at age 40 and beyond, with a substantially higher risk of abnormalities, defects, and illnesses from advanced paternal age, if not maternal as well.
…But make no mistake, parenting is and should be for the young. Men do have a biological clock. Guys, do it for the children.™
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Unknown said…
Guys, do it for the children.
Is this statement mocked because it is usually women who are saying it to men?
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Yes it actually is for the children. But I’m also poking fun at those that abuse that phrase to justify whatever usurpation of rights they have in mind. Ironically, when “do it for the children” is invoked, it is usually to fix some situation that is a result of adults putting themselves first, and of government programs that encourage selfish adult behavior.
And I’m also poking a bit of fun at the inefficacy of citing a particular behavior’s effect on others as justification for a person or group to stop behaving a certain way. If it’s not directly affecting them, or it a person doesn’t directly pay the cost, then exhortations to change behavior quite often fall on deaf ears.
The situation is even more difficult when one is talking about risk. How much risk is too much? What metric does one use?
The thrust of my post is that one can largely dodge such risk/benefit calculations by re-establishing a culture of youthful fecundity. Have your family, gain some maturity and perspective, and *then* decide whether the return on investment in education is worth it.
I’ve cut a bunch of this, because it would be sort of rude to just copy and paste all of EW’s wisdom. So if you want to drink deeply at the fountain of Wapiti Wisdom, click the link and read the whole thing.
vulture of critique 