I had my first son at the ripe old age of 32. My second came along just two years later. I thought it would be easier if I had them closer together in age. The older me now laughs at that naïve girl.
At a time most people are enjoying their first few years of university, my mother-in-law was married and taking care of three kids under the age of five, all in a new country where she didn’t speak the language.
My own mom had my sister and I at 25 and 27.
My point is that we all had kids at different ages and all those kids turned out (or are turning out) to be A-okay. Which is why articles like this one “What’s the Best Age to Have a Child?’ make me ragey.
The article is based on a 15-year project where 6,000 kids and 4,741 moms in Denmark were studied. The conclusion?
Older moms’ children had fewer behavioural, social, and emotional problems when the kids were 7 and 11 years of age. There were no differences when the kids were 15 years old. Throughout childhood, older moms were also less likely to need to reprimand their kids verbally.
Please read that paragraph again because it literally says, that by age 15 there WERE NO DIFFERENCES. How is this even news?
I’m going to be the first to raise my hand and say I’ve screwed up quite a bit as a parent. There were days when I lost my patience, yelled too much, or gave out an unfair punishment or two. And I would bet my hidden pre-menopausal PMS stash that a boatload of parents out there can also say the same, no matter what age they had kids.
Because guess what? There is no best age to have a child. The best age is the age in which you determine that having a child works for you. The truth is, at some point, we’re all going to screw up no matter what. Young, old, or in-between, parenting has its ups and downs. Some days we hit it out of the ballpark, and other days we strike out. But at the end of the day we’re all just doing our best to raise decent human beings.
And you don’t need a study to tell you that.
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