First, came the news linking schizophrenia in children with aged dads, next came the siren of autism for the kids of those aged fathers, and now it’s kids’ IQ’s being lower as a result of their father’s advanced age. Hmmm. So, it seems there is a cause and an effect for those men who have babies late in life. Men too can’t have babies when they are 70 without there being a real cost, unfortunately, the cost being waged on their offspring.
All of these findings are unsettling since there are more and more fathers having families in their late forties, if not fifties, and well, for those starting second or third families, in their sixties and seventies. Let me not get crazy about the Tony Randalls, Larry Kings, and Rupert Murdochs of the world, all with very young children, some too young to be the offspring of their first batch of kids.
Will all of these alarming studies stem the tide of this new cultural more: the gray-haired daddy pushing the Bugaboo stroller? I don’t know since these studies are performed, written about, and then are a mere blip on the news radar, hardly noticed by many. Aside from the now obvious detriments for the kids of aged fathers, well, there is the more pressing issue of how fair it is for these men to have children so late in life. Yes, they may have the financial wherewithal to support these offspring in high style, but what about all of those other norms of fatherhood where throwing a baseball around with your little boy shouldn’t require physical therapy for a pulled muscle?
The only silver lining, if there is such a thing, is that both the reproductive systems of men and women can and will affect the children, unlike the assumed belief that only a woman’s system having this affect. So, there you have it: none of us can delay childbirth till a more convenient time. If only we didn’t live in a world where we are constantly being fooled to believe we can outrun and outsmart Mother Nature. No matter how much poison women inject into their faces or how long they freeze their eggs, there are real human costs to all of these decisions…even if we’re not the ones being directly affected.
