Mother Knows Best

Mother Knows Best

Woman gives birth at 70 -- isn't that ridiculous? Or worse, isn't it unethical, to bear kids you might not be around to see into adulthood?

Those aren't my questions -- they're the undertow in all the reporting on the latest installment in the "how late can you wait" fertility story. This time the new record comes from India where the 70-year-old Rajo Devi finally fulfilled her life-long quest for a baby, via egg donation. (But wait -- didn't Omkari Panwar give birth at 70 in India -- to twins -- this June?) Last year the story came from New Jersey, when psychologist Frieda Birnbaum, already the mother of two adult children and a first-grader, became at 60 the oldest woman to have twins in the US (there seem to be no end of record-setting opportunities).

Responding to dubious questioners, Birnbaum noted at the time, "I think those people [who object] need to get ready for what's coming up in our society. ... There are a lot of middle-aged women [having babies] -- 40s, 50s, now I just turned 60. That's going to be acceptable. They have to just keep up with what's going on with society."

What's going on is revolutionary. The so-far only occasional 60- and 70-year-old mothers get headlines, but the hundreds of thousands of women starting or continuing their families in their late 30s and their 40s, and the increasing numbers having kids in their 50s are the big change agents, redefining women's roles in every respect. It wasn't long ago that they too were facing questions about their suitability as parents -- wouldn't they be too worn out and out of touch with the youth culture? But kids are a fitness program in themselves, parents who start later make the extra effort to keep up, and it turns out that older parents offer special benefits, both to their kids and to the world.

Newly supplied post-1960 with birth control, longer life expectancies, expanded adoption options, and more recently with IVF and egg donation technology, women as a group have been rewriting our life plots, answering Freud's question "what do women want?" by example. It turns out that many of us want families, but we also want careers and a say in the way the world is run. Delaying kids makes it possible for women to have all three, for the first time in history.

That's not the story we tend to hear however. Instead, we get lots of admonitions - either about waiting "too late" to have kids the usual way, or about succeeding "too late" to do the motherhood job well. But though the many media stories about infertility might give you the impression that nobody over 35 can have kids the standard way, many do.

Where in 1970 only 1 in 100 women started their families at or after 35, in 2006 it was 1 in 12. And 1 in 7 babies overall were born to moms 35 or more (611,000 in 2006, of which roughly 6,000 involved egg donation). Add in the adoptive moms and that's quite a crowd of later moms.

Which isn't to say that there are no problems. While about 11% of women are infertile at 35, it's about 50% at 41, and after 43 very few women can have kids the usual way. Egg donation is an option for those who can afford it - chances are 50/50 at every attempt. Adoption is an option too, with its own complexities.

So why do women wait? In interviews, later moms give four basic reasons: education, establishing at work, finding the right partner and self-development. Many cite all four. It turns out that delaying kids has served women as a shadow benefits system, linking to higher lifetime salaries (delay can be a class elevator, and one study shows a 3% annual return to delay in lifetime earnings) and the clout to demand flexible schedules when they're not offered to less experienced workers. As women trickle up into policy-making roles, family friendliness spreads. Maybe soon women who feel ready to start earlier won't have to choose between having kids and earning a decent wage.

In addition, delay leads to greater equality in marital decision-making, a phenomenon that transforms the family dynamic and raises the happiness level of all involved. Amazingly but handily, later moms live longer (partly a physical issue and partly one of health-care access linked to their higher incomes). There's a new twist on the "how-late" contest.

Of course, the demand to expand the fertility window pushes scientific innovation, and we can expect ongoing breakthroughs in that realm.

But perhaps most importantly, later moms are the agents of enormous social change, because their business savvyness and credentials are getting family and women's issues a hearing they've never had before, and moving us toward a culture of care and fairness.

It turns out that many individual women's personal choices add up to good effects for the group. Which brings us back to the 60- and 70-year-old moms. Rajo Devi made her choice in circumstances quite different from Frieda Birnbaum's, to escape the negativity she's lived with as a "barren" woman in a culture where female fertility is highly valued. Relatedly, Omkari Panwar, the mother of two grown girls, sought out IVF at 70 in order to have a son in a world where boys are preeminent. Both women have extended families who will care for the kids if they cannot. Their choices might not be yours, but apparently they make empowering sense to these ladies.

Birnbaum operates in a different but related world in which she and her husband expect to live long in good health and choose to spend their later years actively parenting young children. Sounds neither ridiculous nor unethical, but it does sound new. All these women are exercising choice, which in itself may be what shocks the naysayers. It's a new world when women can write their own life stories, and as they do they further change the world for everybody.

For millennia, mothers have been strategizers, making good choices for their families and themselves in whatever circumstances, based on the available information, and building upon one another's experience. Instead of admonishing mothers for not doing the familiar, it's time to listen and learn. In this season of innovation around standard maternity, we can celebrate and support the familial, in all its forms.

Childcare as Infrastructure: Minting the Common Wealth

Childcare as Infrastructure

In presenting his plan for an economic recovery last week, President-elect Obama spoke of creating 2.5 million jobs by 2011--jobs that would both address the immediate crisis and work as long-term growth engines, by shoring up our crumbling infrastructure and laying the groundwork for the alternative energy industries of the future. These industries are not two but three mints in one (taking mints in the value-producing sense)--supplying jobs today and tomorrow and fighting global warming at the same time! Here's another means of multiplying value and jobs: add childcare to the jobs-creation list.

An expanded national childcare system can also provide at least three mints, of both the short and long term kinds. While Obama aims to fund traditional infrastructure-maintenance work (rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools), in the big picture, good, affordable childcare shores up infrastructure of an even more essential kind, our citizens.

As the enormity of the failure of the current business culture of greed has demonstrated, it's time to rewrite the business model. It's time to move from a culture of greed toward a culture of care, one that invests in all citizens on the understanding that together we are our common wealth. Along with the move to universal education for four-year-olds that Obama has proposed, we badly need a network of care for children 0-3, both to provide all kids with good care and to allow mothers who want to work to contribute fully to the national economy.

To date the case for a national childcare system has been a political nonstarter in the US, though for decades we've seen that the French program serves its families and that nation well--much more satisfactorily than does our lack of program. But in troubled economic times, political barriers to good framework choices suddenly look less imposing.

In the US, good childcare is available to relatively few children. The lack connects to life-time poverty and diminished opportunities for many people, both the children who do not receive good care and the mothers who step out to raise their kids and as a result cut short their own educations, their lifetime earnings and their retirement incomes.

Women of all classes are also discouraged from putting their kids in childcare by the politicized media coverage that over-stresses the importance of constant mom care, partly through contrast with the frequently inadequate childcare now on offer. This negatively affects their long-term earnings ability and women's influence overall in shaping our social institutions because they do not trickle up proportionately into policy-making roles.

There are many ways that a national childcare system might be configured--but here's an outline to open the discussion: neighborhood centers, staffed by trained and well-paid professionals, would provide good, affordable childcare to all the kids in the area whose parents chose it. These centers would also offer parenting classes and drop-in care and would be linked to the health care system. As in France, these centers could take a variety of forms, and might include expanded pre-existent Head Start programs, newly constructed centers run by a national childcare agency, and private businesses, new and pre-existent, run to meet rigorous federal standards and under federal supervision. It would also include partial funding for in-home care for those who need it. Different centers would involve different costs to parents, who could choose among the available options. Funding would involve sliding-scale payments by parents along with government underwriting both directly and through tax credits.

Jobs generated would include construction work for new centers and renovations, hundreds of thousands of teaching positions, as well as new positions for those who teach the teachers. As in both the French and the US Military's childcare programs, teachers in this initiative would be well trained and well compensated, and centers would be supervised and accredited. Teacher turnover would plummet, enrollment would rise and children would thrive. Women of all classes could feel comfortable leaving their kids (the next generation we all count on) in a safe and affordable educational environment while they went to work. What a concept!

This program would pay forward on at least three levels--many mints in one: First, it would increase our human capital and put our nation on track to compete globally with the many nations who already invest more in their kids than we do. Studies suggests that a universal pre-school program would return many times the value to investment over the child's lifetime, and benefits would multiply further with expanded early education.

Second, it would inject a huge economic stimulus<, creating many good jobs nationally. Many of these jobs would go to women. They would differ from current childcare positions in levels of pay, training, and respect. The human capital of teachers would grow as well as that of kids.

Third, the program would free women at all class levels to participate more fully in growing the economy by making good childcare more affordable and by changing the current culture around childcare--countering the current guilt-inducing media coverage that misrepresents childcare's role. Good childcare has much to offer kids in terms of socialization, range of activities, structured environment, and skills development, especially if it's combined with flexible work arrangements that allow parents to cut back on work to be with kids when needed.

The program's expense would be offset in the short term by economic gains from the stimulus it would introduce between 2009 and 2011. It would be offset in the long term by economic gains from women's more consistent work and expanded productivity; from savings on worker replacement and training when parents have to step out because good childcare is not available; from drops in the costs of crime, welfare, and prisons among disadvantaged children; and from the pervasive societal gains in innovation and vitality that expanded education brings to all citizens.

Every crisis brings opportunities. By shifting from a culture of greed to a culture of care, we can multiply our common wealth many times over. Innovations in our provision of health care, family-friendliness and elder care will also mint new value for our national economy and our culture. In addressing recessionary concerns, it's essential that we make innovative use of all our resources. Rather than throwing good money after bad debts, let's bank on the future by creating a level playing field on which all workers and their children, of all classes and both sexes, can flourish and contribute.

[This piece first appeared at huffingtonpost.com]