The VERY surprising cause behind the rise and rise of older mums
NOTHING is more private, intimate and life-changing than having a baby. For a woman, it means sharing your body for nine months, facing the laborious miracle of birth, followed by decades of duty and anxiety.
For a father, it means the same commitment to love and duty, and accepting that you may no longer always come first with your lover. For both, it affects finances, work decisions, home and leisure.
Parenthood is not the only way to become fully adult, but it is certainly a quick and sure one. Most people rise to the challenge. Families hold society together, and joining their ranks is a privilege and a joy.
Once, well under a century ago, this great personal life- change was less a matter of fine timing. You fell in love, you got married (or didn’t) and the sex either resulted in pregnancy, or it didn’t. there were ways to prevent it, but contraception before the Pill was never all that reliable, especially for young, fit, lusty couples.
Most parents were young, in their 20s, and just had to get on with it and help the family scramble up somehow, until the children could get work and move on, leaving the parents still in vigorous middle-age. that is how it still works, for most of the world. that is the biological norm.
But here in Britain it is dramatically changing, and we don’t yet know what the long-term result will be. We already knew that the average age to have a first baby in Britain has tipped past 30: now we hear that last year there were more babies born to women over 35 than to those under 25.
So far it’s only 1 per cent more, and 60 per cent of children are still being born to women aged between 25 and 35.
But it’s a significant, rapid demographic and social jolt when you consider that, as recently as the Eighties when I had mine, doctors raised an eyebrow and sniffily wrote ‘elderly primagravida’ (advanced maternal age) on your notes if you were over 30.
Older motherhood is, gradually, becoming the norm. the arrival of ultra-reliable contraception makes that possible; IVF technology makes it feel less risky.
Fertility does decline after 30, but only gradually, and most women can safely choose to put off the moment. Age 32 and 34 did nicely for me, though I wouldn’t have wanted to wait much longer, as a fifth of women now do.
It’s a choice, and we’re lucky to have it. But when you look at the figures from the Office of National Statistics, it becomes clear that the choice which the Pill bestowed is being eroded in the other direction for thousands of women.
Because this late parenthood isn’t all about selfishness, career choices or Bridget Joneses sitting in wine-bars yowling that chaps ‘ won’t commit’.
If it was all about youth culture and sexual liberation, the trend would be more evenly spread across the nation. But what transpires is that there is a huge North-South divide: it’s about the price of homes, and putting a secure roof over a baby’s head. the figures are clear: the higher the housing costs, the more likely women are to delay having their first child. Since the average age of a firsttime buyer in London and the South is now 37, it’s not hard to work out why, down south, there are far fewer young mothers and far more older ones, and why the reverse is true in the cheaper North-East. unlike many other parts of Europe, we have a dearth of social housing, and an unpredictable private rented sector. An absurd amount of that last lot is mortgaged to buy-to-let landlords, who grew weary of poor returns on savings — and are now able to cash in their pensions at will, too. the amount buy-to-letters owe on mortgages is £200 billion: the size of the whole Hong Kong economy. So when interest rates rise from their present historic low there will be some sort of an earthquake in the rental market, and that will make things even more uncertain.
At the same time, in our overcrowded capital city, residential property is being bought up at lightning speed, often off-plan, by overseas investors, some of whom are undoubtedly hiding dodgy money and mistrusting their own dodgy economies. Properties are then left empty on the principle that their value will rise.
London, to put it crudely, is being pimped out as a sort of global piggybank, and no government has done a thing to stop it. the trend can only spread to other cities as our economy continues to be more stable than most.
Meanwhile, Mrs thatcher’s great right-to-buy reform gave many families security and dignity, but times have moved on and those homes now command high modern prices, sharing the general problem.
It would have been better if that government, and those of all colours since, had committed to replacing them with new social housing, which will always be needed as a stable reassuring base for people on modest incomes — especially key workers who have to live in expensive areas. One in three councils replaced none at all.
House- building has been neglected as the population rises: not only does this create unnecessary hostility and suspicion of innocent and useful migrants and refugees, but it contributes to the enforced delay of adult responsibility. Of making a home, away from your parents’ back bedroom, raising a family of your own, moving on in life.
THIS is all, largely by accident, an enormous social experiment with unforeseeable results. the gap between generations widens: soon there will not be four per century as there used to be, but only three or fewer.
Grandparents grow older: two generations of motherhood in the late 30s or 40s widens the gap to a point of potential stress. My mother, who had me at 34, complained bitterly, when I failed to reproduce earlier, that her grandchildren would be ‘ frightened of her as an old and wrinkly hag’.
Families grow smaller, too, when they start later and when space is limited: children of devoted, educated, intelligent and prudent parents become scarcer. And unless the massively dysfunctional housing market is remedied fast, those children will look around in 20 years’ time, realise they can’t ever have a stable home in Britain, and get out.
there are all sorts of results from this demographic change, and we haven’t crunched through them properly yet.
Of course, no woman should be urged to have her babies before she wants — we’re not some dictatorship demanding compulsory breeding.
But neither should a loving, committed woman be economically bludgeoned into long, often painful delays because there’s nowhere to tuck her babies up at night.