Problem:
In this discussion you are to use your sociological imagination and "make the familiar strange". Using the knowledge you have about your family history (your generation, your parents and grandparents, e.g.) discuss where you see connections between lived experience and the changing characteristics of families over time. These might include race or ethnicity, immigration to the US, social class, education, occupation, religion, gender roles, childrearing practices, etc. If you would like to include photos (no more than three) please do and tell us how they express ideas presented in Chapter 12.
Chapter 12 below:
The first time I had kids, I was pretty much right on time, so to speak. My eldest was born when I was 28 years old. That's about two years shy of the mean age at first birth in 1998, the year she was born. If you consider education level, then I actually had my first child six years younger than the typical man with a college degree. It may be TMI, but she was conceived the oldfashioned way (though not in the back of a Chevy, as the saying goes). When she was born prematurely and spent several weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit, I was panicked. While I had my mother to turn to for advice, none of my friends had kids yet. We figured it all out day to day-literally.
Fast-forward over two decades, and I just had my third child weeks shy of my fiftieth birthday. Before he was conceived, I wondered if I was making a big mistake. After all, as a social scientist I knew all about the research on age and happiness. Namely, happiness steadily declines throughout adulthood, reaching its lowest point around the mid-forties before starting a steady climb. Was it merely a coincidence that the decline corresponded to the prime years of raising kids and that the rise started when most folks became empty nesters? Was I going to miss out on late adulthood happiness by pressing the fertility reset button?
Meanwhile, his conception could not have been more different from the almost unplanned nature of my first. It took two years of in vitro fertility treatment, including two failed embryo implantation attempts, before my wife found herself with child. Reproductively speaking, I was trying to have a child at an advanced paternal age, and the presence of certain neurological and psychological conditions such as schizophrenia in offspring rises with the dad's age. Schizophrenia lowers life expectancy by 15 to 25 years, so I don't think I was alone among parents in my desire to minimize the chances my child would get it. Because this correlation is stronger in sons than in daughters, we decided to do what we could to reduce this sort of risk by testing each five-day blastocyst that we (or rather, the lab) had created to determine its sex. Those first two failed attempts at pregnancy involved the female embryos, leaving us with only frozen males to implant. We held our breath and tried. It worked.
I reassured myself with studies arguing that most of the increased risk of such conditions results not from the aging process of older men's sperm (which do accumulate more mutations with each decade of life) but from adverse selection-to use the technical term. Namely, men who don't have their first child until age 40 or 50 are different than men who manage to reproduce at, say, age 30. They themselves have more genetic risk for psychopathology. That is, men with mental health or neurological issues are more likely to have kids later in life. The apparent effect of older dads was (mostly) not from the aging process, but from the logic of dating and mating-older first-time dads were more likely to have problems, even if reaching a threshold to be diagnosable.
Since I had been a first-time dad at a much younger age, I hoped my son would not be at a substantially higher risk for schizophrenia than his brother, who was born almost 20 years before. Instead, my worries (for I always worry) turned to other issues. How long would I live? As much as this third child would enjoy a more comfortable and economically secure life than his older siblings did -given that I am more financially secure than I was at 28-he would by definition have me around for much less time than they did. I hesitated to look at the life tables provided by the Social Security Administration, but they indicated that I could expect 30 more years of life, if I were an average American male. That's all he would get of me. And I would need to stay employed-if possible-for 22 of those 30 years in order to see him through college. Additionally, how different would this son's childhood be from that of his brother?
My youngest niece started swiping screens before age one, and by 14 months she managed to call up her favorite Peppa Pig videos on her brothers' iPhones. Moreover, a friend recently signed up his newborn daughter for a Gmail account and started cc'ing her on all e-mail threads that involved her (such as brunch plans) so that she would have a concrete record of some of her preverbal experiences. I hadn't considered these issues with my first child, but the world had changed even over the course of my lifetime.
As lifespans lengthen and age at first birth continues to climb, it turns out that I am at the leading edge of a growing group of older parents-many of whom probably share some of these same worries. Over 9 percent of births today are to fathers over the age of 40 and about 1 percent of births are to dads over the age of 50. Women, as well, are extending their fertility careers, with many having children well into their forties-partly thanks to the increased use of in vitro fertilization (IVF). As adolescence creeps up through the twenties, such childbearing at older ages is perhaps inevitable, even if it requires an assist from technology.
I can report that while many of my worries have not abated, at least one has: Though I am exhausted and can't even believe I went through this sort of extended sleeplessness back when I needed more hours abed on account of being younger, my happiness does seem to be rising, despite (or because of) the new addition to the household. Of course, not regretting your kids is one of the strongest social norms in modern society, so you may not believe me. But I'm telling you, sociologist to sociologist, it's true. (Though you should definitely ask me again when he's a teenager asking to borrow the car keys.) Need Assignment Help?