> this source for example claims global life expectancy jumped from around 47 to 72 from 1950 to 2022
I believe this is because of reductions in child mortality more than increases in adult lifespan. So it doesn't affect the number of great grandmothers that much.
Having kids older is definitely a big change for society and individual families, though. Every day as a parent I wish I was 15 years younger and my parents were too. It would be a huge difference in our energy levels and that's so important when you're hanging out with young kids. And it's 15 years less time that we will be able to spend together with our kids.
I've always had this weird thought - that doesn't really pass the ethics test, but here it is anyway.
I was raised by my grandmother - let's just say my parents were not ready. And I know a lot of parents that want their kids to have kids but the kids aren't ready. What if it would become the norm for Grandparents to raise the children? That way the second generation can focus on their careers, etc and the first generation could raise the third. That wouldn't mean the second generation wouldn't have a role and be a part of the process. Of course, there would have to be consent on each level - and if it was part of the culture maybe there would be. Also, technology may have a role in this also - if no one has to actually carry the children, the second generation could be more willing.
The whole point is that this happens all the time, but it's always seen as a break from the norm, not the norm. What if we just embraced it?
The next generation would happen earlier, the first generation would have their grand kids and the second generation would have time to "wait" for whatever reason.
Again, I know this doesn't really work out, but it's a thought I've always had.
Still think about this essay on the topic I saw on twitter a few years back:
https://hmmdaily.com/2018/10/18/your-real-biological-clock-i...
> If you intend to have children, but you don’t intend to have them just yet, you are not banking extra years as a person who is still too young to have children. You are subtracting years from the time you will share the world with your children.
If you ever sit down and really think about it, it is absolutely wild how profoundly the invention of the birth control pill has changed the course of human history, our cultures, and human society.
It's gotta be up there with, like, writing and fire, in terms of shaping the destiny of our species.
Aren't life expectancy at birth figures heavily skewed by infant mortality rates. I think this is quite a commonly misunderstood statistic for this reason. So while it's true that in the past a new born baby's chances of becoming a great grandparent were much lower than they would be today, that would mainly be due to the low chances of them ever reaching adulthood and becoming a parent at all, rather than the chances of parents living beyond 47.
When I was about 16 years old it became my life dream to get married young and to have kids young. My inspiring thought was that I could be a young grandparent and that my kids would be able to know their parents for a long time as well as their grandparents and great grandparents. I did get married at 19 and had my first son at 20. 3 years later I had my daughter. 5 months into my daughters life, the kids mother left us and I was stranded alone as a single father of 2 at age 23. That was 4 years ago and it was the most difficult time of my life. I moved back in with my parents and my then recently "empty cage" mother had to become a "mum" again while I slowly got back on my feet. I've been remarried for about a year now and everything is going very well. My daughter is about to turn 4 and my son turns 7 this year. I love thinking about how when I'm 30 my son will be 10 and when I'm 40 he'll be 20 etc.
Before the divorce, I was very adamant on promoting young marriage/childbearing to others. In a perfect world I still think it's a good idea... but I am a lot more open minded and less critical. Life is so unique and never goes according to plan. I wouldn't recommend my exact life to anyone as it has its own unique and undesirable difficulties. When my own children grow up, I will strongly recommend against rushing anything with anyone until they're absolutely sure and have a good plan in place.
My kids know and love their grandparents. They know their great grandparents. I am prepared physically and mentally for 2 more kids (yes I know, but I think I know better than I did at 19), but I cannot imagine doing the whole baby thing in my mid 30s or early 40s... I think my current age is a good time to just get it all out of the way. I like to think of it as delayed gratification and that having adult children at a relatively young age is a huge blessing. Let's see how it goes.
The framing of this essay bothers me, because it suggests that losing great-grandmothers is a bad thing.
But why can't we focus on the enormous positive effect of girls having the option to fully mature into women before bearing their children?
Maybe instead of focusing what we lose with the absence of great-grandmothers, we should focus on what we gain with the decline of girl-mothers.
We need more good examples of what “old parents” look like in modern society. Having a first child in your 40s is often painted as a pessimistic, undesirable situation to be in, where you will “lack energy” and patience to take care of a small child.
But why? If we’re serious about extending lifespans the average age of parents should be going up. People should be using their younger years to establish themselves in society and build a sustainable lifestyle. By the time you are 40, the costs and demands of a small child should be effortless, easily solved with the riches you’ve accumulated. By the time you hit 60s, your child is graduating college and getting on with life. If you’re lucky maybe you live to 90 and even see them reach well into middle age. This doesn’t sound like a bad timeline.
It's a very parochial article I think. Sure, there are some numbers for the trends and such, but I suspect that people will continue to have kids both when they are younger and when they are older to some extent. Which is more likely for you is probably heavily influenced by your socioeconomic status. This is just going to vary significantly from person to person. Examples from my own family:
A great grandmother to my children died last year. Her oldest great grandchild at the time was 13. She missed meeting the youngest by a couple of months.
This same oldest great grandchild also has a living great grandmother still, and one that died in 2003 and one that died in 2005. So even within the same family, and even for the same person, the experience of having a great grandmother can be quite different.
The article got one thing wrong. Life expectancy of 45 doesn't mean that people drop dead at that age. High infant mortality is one main reason for low life expectancy. That's why you have many people of old age even in the middle ages when life expectancy was abysmal. So I am not convinced that great-grand parents is such a recent thing.
Research confirms a narrowing of families with fewer children and fewer cousins, but it also notes it's more likely for people to know their ancestors:
In their analysis, Alburez-Gutierrez and his colleagues made three major predictions about family structures, also called kinship networks. First, extended family size will likely decrease over time. Second, the composition of families will narrow: Alburez-Gutierrez explains that people will have fewer close-aged relatives in their own generation, such as siblings and cousins, and more ancestors, such as grandparents and great-grandparents. Third, age gaps between generations will grow as people increasingly have children later in life.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/shrinking-family-...
Another thing to keep in mind: there is a lot of variability depending on the community and social standards. People in Utah will have a different experience than folks in the Bay Area. In rural northern New York and Ohio, the Amish population has exploded with couples marrying in their early 20s and families typically having at least 5 or 6 kids, sometimes more than 10.
My spouse had our kids in her late 30s, but they have no first cousins on either of the side of the family (of the 6 people in our generation, we're the only two who had kids). Of all of our kids' dozens of friends growing up, only one had more than two siblings and they were an immigrant family.
OTOH, my wife works with people who had kids in their late teens and early 20s and are grandparents by the age of 40, and that's typical in the community.
Standard comment about how one shouldn't use raw life expectancy in this kind of argument. Here you should use the life expectancy of people with at least one child. It's irrelevant to the argument how many people die before having children or at what age they die.
In my case, my grandfather did become a great grandfather, even though he, my parents and my sister all had children pretty late. He just lived a very long time.
It's interesting to compare this some research which says that children of older fathers and grandfathers live longer. If I understand this article correctly, it's saying that if the paternal grandfather was also older when becoming a father, that's even better.
In Christmas 2021, as COVID was winding down, we rented a house on the Oregon coast to see my wife’s family. My wife’s grandmother surreptitiously messaged me on Facebook to pick her up from her house so she could see our youngest, her newest great grand. Much to the consternation of my COVID-wary father in law. In her view, the point of living the 87 was to count up the great grandchildren (10 total). She died the next year (not of COVID).
If my kids have kids the same time I did, as do those kids, then within the expected Asian male lifespan I should see at least one and hopefully two great grands.
I wish I lived in a society where I could have a kid at 25 rather than 35 without messing up my life. I feel like we ignore how nice it must be to have another 10 years with your parents in your life.
i think an interesting orthogonal trend is how changes in family size affect grandparent relationships.
my grandparents were in the generation that had lots of kids, which leads to lots of grandkids. that meant that family gatherings were huge crowds where they served as a figureheads and i didn't really develop a one-on-one relationship with them.
but when i look just one generation removed, i see smaller family sizes so grandparents have far fewer grandkids. and they're developing actual relationships with their grandchildren in a completely different way.
Although life expectancy was a lot lower in the past than today that was mostly due to infant mortality. It's true that a lot of women died during childbirth, which meant that the life expectancy of women was less than that of men (I think), but I would guess that a woman who survived giving birth to at least one child who survived probably had a "reasonable" chance of surviving to 60 or 70. So I don't think great-grandmothers would have been that unusual in the past.
> It’s slightly paradoxical — in the past, I’ve thought about how since life expectancy is increasing, there probably will be more great-grandmothers. But on the other hand, people are having children much later too.
Apparently two or more independent variables create a paradox.
Just a little point that the life expectancy given there is "at birth" and unless I'm mistaken, it's the mean. Which means infant mortality contributes enormously to this figure. It's a misconception that in the past you would only rarely see someone much older than 50. I'm not sure how this would affect the analysis. But it's worth bearing in mind. I'm sure there were plenty of great grandparents before 1900. That usage of great seems to stem from the 1500s. https://www.etymonline.com/word/great-grandfather#etymonline...
Not necessarily false, but the author jump a bit quickly to the conclusion with the data it takes for granted. It’s well known that life expectancy was far lower before due to high rate of child mortality. This means that the main cause of the life expectancy is more people reached adulthood.
All the more, great-grandmothers always had far less chance to die early by being turned into a cannon fodder or driven to suicide through toxic masculinity social pressure (though it’s not like having more chance to be raped by invaders or beaten/abused/repudiated by your own relatives was much more fun). Still to this days, on the average women have generally a higher life expectancy in most countries.
My wife is only a few years younger than I am, but she still has all of her grandparents. They are around age 80.
I didn't have my first child until I was almost 40, and my grandmother on my father's side died the week we were going to tell everyone that we were having a kid. My other three grandparents all died in the 1990's.
Also, many of my cousins had kids before they were 20, some of them became grandparents before I even became a parent. And likewise, I ended up with aunts/uncles that became great-grandparents before my dad became a grandparent.
My last-living great-grandparent died when I was about a month old. I hope he got to meet me, though of course I wouldn't remember. The odd thing is that my parents (to my recollection) never spoke of him.
My mother's parents died before I was born, and my father's parents died when I was around 10 years old. With the exception of my great-grandfather, my other great-grandparents died in the 1940s and '50s. They barely got to know their own grandchildren before they passed.
My parents were unusual for their generation in that they waited until their mid 30s to start having kids (despite having been married for 9 years already). On my dad's side, he was the final child of my grandmother's third marriage; she was 42 when my dad was born (again, unusual for the time).
No real point to this post, I guess. I just think it's interesting that people's experiences can differ so much. I only knew half of my grandparents, and even then only as a child; the idea of people being able to meet their great-grandparents wasn't even something I ever considered when I was younger. I don't recall for sure, but I don't think many if any of my grade-school friends had great-grandparents around either. I've always had a very small extended family, and hearing stories from friends as a kid about family gatherings always made me feel like I was missing out.
One kid is good enough so I don't regret getting one at 38. Letting grand parents help with child caring also carries a lot of downsides, especially if they live in.
My siblings and I did unusually well at school (relative to cousins and peers) - and it’s possible this was due to having an “older” father.
There’s a 2017 study that older parents produce kids with a higher Geek Index —
https://www.nature.com/articles/tp2017125
Seems “truthy” to me.
I see a lot of comments here focused on their individual experiences and opinions, which is fine. But on those comments I see a lot of people saying they won't have kids. Which individually is their choice, but collectively, combined with people who do have kids have them older which can lead to fertility issues when they want to have them, combined with the increase in the number of people who is LGBTQ+ which again it's their choice and nothing wrong with that individually, but as a species we can see how these factors combined, and other factors, are the cause of drop in number of children born in all countries. I recently read that in Japan there are more adult diapers sold than baby diapers because of drop in births and increase of aging population. This seems to be driving us to extinction as a species, just food for thought.
I have an example that helps underscore the lesson here.
I was adopted by older parents, in their mid-40s when I was adopted around 2 years old. They were the "youngsters" in their families, so it meant I was exceedingly young compared to my cousins and other relatives.
Fast forward a few decades and my adoptive parents are deceased, and we have lost touch with the few relatives I have. My wife is in a similar situation.
We adopted two older children, 7 and 3 at the time, when I was in my mid 40's. It has been great for us and for the kids, a challenge and an adventure, but the biggest miss is lack of family. We have no grand parents to fall back on, let alone great grand parents. It is incredibly difficult to raise kids without an extended family to help out. We manage, but boy do I envy those who have bigger families to lean into. Not to mention the network of cousins, etc that the kids can relate to.
With the economy as it is, grandparents tend to work longer and both work, so the early retirement and single-wage of yesteryear are largely gone. This trend seems to be increasing. The value of intergenerational bonds and knowledge transfer will be lost as a result.
My great-grandfather was widowed and remarried in late 1940ies to a woman who was his university-age daughter's friend (that daughter was my grandmother). Yeah, he was considerably older (late 40ies/early 50ies?) than her (like 23?). That lady is my great-grandmother (sure, she's not blood related to me but they had children and they are all my various uncles/aunts and cousins). When I brought in my children to see the family, they got to meet their both of their great-grandmothers, great-grandfather, and on top of that their great-great-grandmother. Now THAT's rare.
Our children had several years with their great-grandmother. We treasured that time for them and even arranged for her (my wife's grandmother) to live with us for a few days a week after she could no longer stay in her home alone. We were able to keep this arrangement for a few years. Our children aren't adults yet, so we don't know if our children will have children young enough that our parents could meet their great-grandchildren, but we're glad we didn't prevent the possibiliy by starting our family late.
The author says that shorter life expectancies in the past means that there weren't many great-grandparents back in the day.
I don't think that's the case: the shorter average life expectancy is due to infant and youth mortality. As long as you didn't die from what would nowadays be a preventable disease, people still got old: that's where the term "three score years and ten" comes from.
So I think there were probably many 70yo great grandparents.
Apple will soon include A.I. in iPhones that will in essence provide an eternal simulation of each of us. Progeny will be able to interact with us in our own voices and likely in 3D. When openAI and its humanoid robots align, your AI clone will be uploaded to the unit. Unfortunately “you” won’t be able to enjoy or reciprocate “their” enjoyment. Similar to if you recorded a video to your family today and they watched it after you passed away.
My kids got to meet four of their great grandparents, although they were still very young when they did pass away - I have pictures of them with their great-grandparents, but they don't have any memories of them. Mine were all long gone before I was born... I don't know that anything is being "lost" in the sense that it was something we used to have. Meeting one's great grandparents was very rare in generations past and continues to be.
We just said goodbye to my kid's great grandmother. They knew her very well and treated her like a their regular grandma. When my eldest son was just under 1 year old he met his great-great grandmother (who died shortly after meeting him at 105). I think me and my wife's parents will live to see their great grand children. It's not too far fetched to imagine.
Great-grandparents? The window for grandparents might be closing! If you have your kids at 35, and your kids have their kids 35, you are 75 by the time the grandchild turns 5. The amount of quality time you might have to spend with your grandchild could be approximately zero (depends of course on your health).
At this rate even grandparents...
Most of my (37) friends in Italy does not have children. Some of us are late children so the parents are between 70 and 80.
I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties.
That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.
I once read that the significant growth of life expectancy could be attributed to lowering rate of child mortality, and that life expectancy for adults has changed less dramatically. If that’s the case, the point that overall life expectancy going from 47 to 72 affected the “grandmother window” is probably inaccurate.
US Rep. Lauren Boebert is a grandma at 37, and her mother (if alive - I don't know) will turn 56 this year.
Ah just what I needed, more anxiety.
Later, fewer kids. Another more prominent trend is the death of the cousin:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cousins-decline-canada-1.7103...
For that matter, a small change in number of siblings makes a much larger change in the number of cousins. That is, if every family has N children, you have N-1 siblings and 2N(N-1) cousins. (Corrected thanks to comment)
My great-grandfather, whom I met a few times in the ‘50s, was born during the Civil War.
Some of my relatives had told their toddler "we're going to granny of your grand-dad".
Yep, that's 5 generations at once. That particular sub-branch has children later so they are a full generation ahead of my own branch, so I've told.
I'm 47. My grandparents were born in 1908. My father was born in 1939, and I was born when he was 38. I have no kids, but we didn't get around to trying IVF until I was over 40 (my father would have been 78)
My grandfather was born in 1904, his son (my father) was born in 1941, I was born in 1979, my son in 2020. Great-grandparents have been out of the picture for awhile on my side of the family.
Heh. I knew a guy in his late thirties that was already a grandfather (do the math). I would bet that there's a good chance he's still around (I knew him about 40 years ago).
Both of my great-grandmothers died by the time by 12 months old. A message to my children - hurry up, make my living parents great-grandparents!
I attended my great-great-grandmother's 100th birthday party when I was 8 or 9.
My kid didn't get to meet his grandmother (my mom). She had me at 30, I had him at 46, one year too late.
One of the problems with capitalism is that the highest achieving people (somewhat likely the actual "fittest" people in terms of genetic selection) don't have kids until they are much later, if at all. I don't want this to get too elitist, but this country (actually the entire first world aside from France) needs to figure out how to incentivize productive people to have kids.
I always thought what we should do with the people in retirement for longer and longer periods of time is encourage them to provide some child care, even if it isn't their own. Especially in some countries (Japan, holy shit South Korea) that really are imbalanced.
Although, tangentially, I think South Korea will solve its demographic bomb by toppling North Korea's government and immigrating a massive number of shellshocked North Koreans.
Count everyone on earth as your relative.
Yeah, that is a pity.
There's a saying (Chinese proverb maybe) regarding a having a healthy family tree
* May you live to see seven generations *
Which I took as mean grandparents to grandkids (with one "great" on either side)
Good luck all
For pete sake, don't break up the flow and over-complicate your very first sentence with irrelevant asides like this:
> A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that my grandmother (this grandmother) became a grandma (not my grandma) at 45.
I got confused and distracted trying to solve the riddle of why his "grandmother" was not his "grandma" [0] when it had nothing to do with the point he was trying to make. And the "this grandmother" parenthetical could have just been a subtle inline link.
> A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that _my_grandmother_ became a grandma at 45.
Much clearer!
0: I think he meant that his grandmother's first grandchild, who born when she was 45, was someone other than the author, so technically she wasn't /his/ grandma at that moment because he didn't actually exist yet.
[dead]
Its sad and a crisis. However I have money saved and a comfy job. Yet I am exhausted. Domapnied burned out mess adhd riddled anxiety kissless virgin
Some people still get pregnant with 14, and the next generation makes the same "mistake", as that led to not an ideal family situation and wise parenting. (German here, so no foul play / illegal intercourse happening in most of such cases.)
If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents.
My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plenty mobile. I knew two of my great grandmothers, one of them only dying in my teens.
Not everyone can rely on parents to help with childcare, but it is worth keeping in mind that if you wait until your mid 30's they might not be able to catch a running toddler like they could a decade earlier.
My mom also managed to have a really good career, though she went to night school when I was around 6 and worked her ass off in general. But, she had a high earning partner to support her.
I don't really have a single point here, except that I worry we've ignored the less-obvious downsides to people delaying childbearing until their mid 30's.