A couple of years ago, when I was only just pregnant, I went to a birthday lunch attended by a range of extended family members who were, shall we say, of a significant age. At one point, I got talking to a woman who was I’m not sure how many cousins removed from me. I don’t know how we got onto the topic of children - I was still within the 12-week wall of disclosure and hadn’t broadcast my condition - but she told me about her brood of children and how she’d had a fifth child at the ripe old age of 40, well after her first four, who were evenly and properly spaced in her twenties. Bumping into an acquaintance at the doctor’s surgery while going to a routine check-up, she was told ‘Oh Mrs C_____, you’re the talk of the town!’
OK, it was a small town, but still. Clearly, even a married woman couldn’t avoid the gentle opprobrium of being the talk of the town for having what was thought to be an inappropriately-timed baby, a visible sign that the couple in question were still getting busy at an unseemly age.
This was, of course, a wee while ago now. Mrs C______ was the talk of her town in the early 1970s, having had most of her children, as was the done thing, in her twenties in the early 1960s.
In New Zealand, as in a number of other western countries, the average age of first births has risen sharply since the mid-twentieth centruy. In the 1950s and 1960s, the average age of first births was much lower, averaging in the early 20s. In the 1975, the median age was 25. In 2012, Statistics New Zealand established, with the usual caveats that: "the median age of mothers giving birth to their first child is roughly 28 years, two years younger than the average across all mothers. The median age for both childbirth and birth of first child has remained steady since 2001. The median age of women giving birth to their second child is roughly 32 years.' Furthermore, women are, overall, having fewer children.
Clearly, women’s consensus on when ‘the right time’ is to have a baby has shifted in the last half-century. But this ‘consensus’ is not only the result of individual ‘choice’ (and biological capability), but also societal pressure. Teenage mothers are frowned on, as are mothers over forty. Even those past their early 30s receive some censure, not least in the description of their pregnancies. At 34, my first pregnancy was clinically described as “geriatric primigravida’ or, in other words, ‘way old at time of first pregnancy’ (humph!). Furthermore, societal approval or censure depends on who it is having children - if white and middle-class, you should be having children and are being selfish by leaving it late or not at all; if brown and poor, you should be having few to no children, so as to minimise bludging off the state.
But it is not simply societal pressure that polices ‘the right time.’ Finding ‘the right time’ - assuming a woman has some choice in the matter - to have children in order to balance the competing demands of career - and again assuming this is something a woman wants - and family has been a plank of second and third-wave feminism. And it varies from woman to woman, career to career. Emily Monosson’s edited collection about the experience of women scientists, for example, traced the consequences for each mother in the timing of their children. Some had their children as graduate students, and several of those then had to negotiate ‘alternative career paths’ or effectively position themselves as unecumbered in order to fight for tenure (a couple had partners who took on the full-time care-giving role in order to do this). Others had their children once they had received tenure, but had to either change the focus of their work - for example, pursuing a policy path rather than a lab-based path - or fight to be taken seriously by minimising the ‘distractions’ from their work. In no case did any of these mothers have an easy time of it. Those who came closest were those whose partners shouldered the traditionally female role of primary care-giver.
There seems to be an idea that if only the magical right time can be found, women can plan their families and careers, with minimal financial and emotional penalties for motherhood. But when is it? Early, so you can physically recover more quickly, have more energy to parent, and years yet to decide on a career? Or later, so you can establish yourself in a career, negotiate good benefits and be a more mature parent? There are pros and cons to both. On the web, parenting sites, medical sites, financial planning sites, life-coaching sites, and even respectable news sites too abound with varying answers to the question of ‘when is the right time to have children’?
It's a key issue covered by Anne-Marie Slaughter in her provocative 2012 article, ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have it All’, in which, among other things, she debunked the myth of ‘finding the right time.’ She comments:
The most important sequencing issue is when to have children ... the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make. You should be able to have a family if you want one - however and whenever your life circumstances allow - and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce.
A range of books by other feminist writers - Anne Crittenden, Madeleine Kunin, Marilyn Waring, to name but a few - have detailed exactly what these trade-offs are: loss of income, loss of status, loss of future benefits (such a retirement savings), increased insecurity in the event of marital breakdown. And an increasing percentage of women in western countries - up to 30% of women of child-bearing age - are apparently deciding - or failing not to decide - that the trade-offs are not worth it.
Yet that still means around 60-70% of women still are having children, planned or unplanned, old, median-aged or young, rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy, aware of the costs involved ... or not. These are for a range of reasons - familial pressure being a frequently cited one - but one could not really consider them ‘rational choices’ if the pros and cons were solely rationally weighed up. One of my husband’s former co-workers once said that ‘there would never be a right time to have kids if you ever really thought about it.’ Ensuring that both individual women and societies don’t ever ‘really think about it’ seems a given.
I mean, if a society really thought about what it takes to raise children then it would channel its tax dollars into measures that support families and encouraged the gun-shy (rather than coercing the downright ’nos’, of course) into parenthood: paid parental leave for all families, universal family support payments throughout childhood, paternity leave, properly subsidised and adequately remunerated childcare, and so on.
Now, when is the right time to have that conversation?
