Would-be parents! Have you had the temerity to get an education, work on your career, and develop and refine your relationship with a partner before getting down to baby-havin’? Maybe the tanking economy is changing your plans?
Then you, my friends, are responsible for six “dominoes” that lead to terrible, if vague, societal costs according to a press release from Dr. Alan Singer. His take is that delaying childbirth is BAD and will mean BAD THINGS and some people might not get to be GRANDPARENTS if you don’t start pushing out heirs RIGHT. NOW!
If I just channeled your mother there, I’m sorry. On many levels.
Singer is a self-styled “family size expert” who writes a blog mostly devoted to exhorting people to not delay childbearing, no matter what. The dominoes he refers to are thus: delayed marriage, delayed childbearing, augmented infertility, elevated multiple births, increased rates of pre-term births and caesarian sections.
His main piece of advice is that parents should “encourage” their adult children to get themselves good and knocked up, even going so far as to suggest they offer financial support to talk them into doing so. Not surprisingly, he also thinks helicopter parenting is A-OK.
Okay, I can acknowledge he has a bit of a point – it is a good idea to start sooner rather than later, if your life works out that way. But what Singer and others like him don't get is that for many of us, life just doesn’t. I didn’t marry until I was 30, which put me right about in the middle of my circle of friends age-wise. Not to mention that the two leading causes of female infertility, endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome, or PCOS, are not age linked. I have PCOS and would have been just as infertile at 21 as I was at 31 – and personally, I would have been a considerably worse mother.
And if my parents had dared to start rattling the grandchildren cage? Would NOT have been pretty.
