News About Fatherhood

When I was growing up, a process I did not complete until about the age of 26 due to chronic immaturity, the prominent view among my straight friends and I was that men were far more interested in casual sex rather than commmitted relationships. We thought fatherhood and family life were things they wanted to avoid at all costs.
It took a long time for those prejudices to fade, even when we started to date men in their mid-30s and the tone of our relationships started to change. It turns out that the change may have been dictated not by our own maturity as women, but by the MALE biological clock.

That’s according to a The Globe and Mail report on a research study conducted by Andrew Wyrobek of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Brenda Eskenazi of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health.

• Women’s biological time clock has long been known, with older women having an increased risk of miscarriage and of producing children with genetic defects such as Down Syndrome.

• “Our research suggests that men, too, have a biological time clock — only it is different,” Dr. Eskenazi said in a statement. “Men seem to have a gradual rather than an abrupt change in fertility and in the potential ability to produce viable, healthy offspring.”

• Both men and women have been postponing parenthood in recent years. Since 1980, the researchers said, birth rates have increased 40 per cent for men aged 35 to 49, while there has been a decline in births involving men under 30.

What do you think? When you and your partner decided to have children, did you notice his desire to become a father had become more pronounced around a certain age?