Read as much about older parents as I do, and you'll soon see that one of the biggest reasons people are glad they waited to have kids is because their finances are in better shape in mid-career than they were when they were younger. That's true for my wife and me as well - while not exactly flush with cash, we can usually provide what we want our children to have.
But I find the money far less valuable than two other things I can provide at this age than I probably could have earlier - my time to share with them, and a stable home to grow up in.
I was still moving around a lot when the first round of my friends started having kids, I was 30 by the time I finished graduate school. After that, I moved around trying to establish my career. I never lived in a place more than a few years before moving on.
Five years ago I bought my first home, and it is, for the most part, the only home my son has known, and the only place my daughter has lived outside of the time she spent in the NICU. Des and I are planning at this point that our kids will spend the whole of thier childhoods in the pink house in Lewisville we call home.
It was much the same for me and my brother Scott, the two kids in my parents' second generation of children. The two of us lived in three different houses, but all within about two blocks of each other. I lived in the same house from when I was 5 until I went off to college.
It was a much different experience for my older siblings, all born in the 1940s. My parents moved from state to state and house to house - my sister once counted 11 different homes she lived in as a child. I think my brother and I got the better end of that deal.
Because we are more settled, my wife and I can spend much more time face-to-face with our kids, and I think that's the best gift a parent can give a child. The money helps ease things for us for sure, but I doubt it makes much difference in a child's life. Even though my parents had settled down, they still didn't have much, but it never seemed to matter to us. Having a place I can look back on and call my childhood home, now that matters a lot.
Friday, March 09, 2007
The best thing for my kids about being an older dad
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
A brand new study from Finland:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Select+from+History&query_key=10&WebEnv=0FUk-AGOeDRgXLURmwdBeH4xZ7Gt9q5Vh8ILfJM1Lscdlfhkvtgojgz3wfz68uVxQaWbekew%40D46B4DBA5E056220_0196SID&WebEnvRq=1
1: Eur J Paediatr Neurol. 2007 Mar 6; [Epub ahead of print]Newborns at risk for special education placement: A population-based study.Mannerkoski MK, Aberg LE, Autti TH, Hoikkala M, Sarna S, Heiskala HJ.
Department of Child Neurology, Hospital for Children and Adolescents, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland.
OBJECTIVES: To establish the contributions of birth weight (BW), gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and parental age on risks for special education (SE) placements in school-age children. METHODS: A population-based sample of 900 school-age children attending the following full-time SE groups: at level 1, children had isolated neurodevelopmental, physical, or other impairments; at level 2, borderline to mild intellectual disability (ID); and at level 3, moderate to severe ID. Three hundred and one children enrolled in mainstream education formed the control group (level 0). For all children with siblings, we defined familiar forms of learning disorders as having a sibling in one of the SE groupings. We performed our analysis for the entire cohort as well as comparing risk factors within the familial and non-familial types of SE groupings. RESULTS: In multinomial logistic regression analysis, age of father 40 years, low BW (<2500g or <-2 SD), male sex, and parent's lower SES, all increased the probability of SE placement. In the familial forms of levels 2 and 3, the parental SES was lower and, in addition, in the level 2, the family size was bigger. Furthermore, in the non-familial form of level 2, both the low and the high (4000g) BW were more common. CONCLUSIONS: Among the known risk factors for learning disabilities (LD), our study highlighted the importance of a higher paternal age and a lower SES especially in the familial forms of LD.
Post a Comment