GEEK speak

Having ‘geekier’ sons has pros and cons

Admired for their intellect despite a perceived lack of social graces, geeks run the world. If you’re hoping for a son with a “geekier” nature, new research suggests fathering a baby later in life.

Sons of older fathers are more intelligent, more focused on their interests and less concerned about fitting in, all characteristics typically seen in “geeks,” according to research conducted at the Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City and published in the journal Translational Psychiatry.

“Our study suggests that kids of older men are not only smarter, but also better able to adapt to environments that require dedicated pursuit of one’s goals, characteristics that promote educational and, likely, career success,” said Magdalena Janecka, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Seaver Center. “We think it’s particularly important to acknowledge the benefits associated with older fathers, as these results will help better inform us about the links between higher paternal age, autism and the positive characteristics identified in the study.”

Fathering a child later in life is not without challenges. Previous research has shown that children born to older fathers are at higher risk for adverse conditions including autism and schizophrenia.

This new research shows that these children may also have certain advantages over their peers in educational and career settings.

“The most surprising thing we found was that in the current, knowledge-driven economy, children born to older men are actually likely to do better in life than those whose father was younger at conception. This was surprising as it may change the way we think of those advanced paternal age effects,” Janecka said. “Taking into account that men who delay fatherhood often do so precisely because they are successful themselves, it seems fairly logical that their offspring also displays some advantages.”

For the study, “geekiness” was defined “as having high non-verbal intelligence (logical and math skills), having a strong focus on the subject of interest and not paying too much attention to fitting in with the peer group,” Janecka said.

These days being labeled a geek or nerd is not a bad thing.

“We showed that being ‘geeky,’ which in our sample was strongly associated with older age at parenthood, is also linked with better school performance. This effect was particularly strong for the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), which were previously shown to be a much better predictor of future income than school performance overall. Although we could not verify this directly, because our participants are still young, this suggests that offspring of older men may end up more likely to have higher socioeconomic status in the future,” Janecka said.