The Advantages of Having Children in Your Mid-to-Late 30s

Having a first baby after 35 is no longer unusual. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2015 that about one in five babies is born to a woman who is 35 or older, and births to women between 35 and 39 rose roughly three percent from 2012 to 2013. Each year the count climbs. None of that makes conceiving or carrying a pregnancy effortless during the later fertility years. Women who become mothers in their 30s do face a somewhat higher chance of miscarriage and birth defects, though women at every age can run into those same complications.

So yes, there are real risks. There is also a lot of joy, and a handful of genuine benefits that rarely get talked about when people fixate on the so-called ticking clock. If you are in your 30s and thinking about a baby, it helps to set the panic aside and actually look at what you have going for you.

Start with wisdom. Older mothers have simply lived longer, which usually means they have seen more: places traveled to, losses survived, good and bad calls made, life witnessed at its highs and its lows. That breadth tends to show up in parenting. A woman in her late 30s is often quicker to tell a workable approach from one that won't hold up, where someone in her teens or early 20s may not yet have the footing to make those calls. Younger parents frequently follow whatever is trending; older ones are more likely to reach for the home remedies and habits their own mothers used, the ones that already proved themselves.

Money matters too. By the mid-to-late 30s, most women have been working long enough to have built a career and put something aside: for baby gear, housing, healthcare, daycare, maybe private school or college down the road. Many are married by then, own a home, and have a clear read on what they want out of life, which at that point may well be a child. They have already done the climbing. Some choose to stay home once the baby arrives and others keep working, but in both cases they tend to carry fewer financial burdens, less debt, less of a scramble. Mothers who do go back to work can afford to be picky about finding solid childcare. A younger mom might still be single, still job-hunting, still in school, still figuring the whole thing out. That said, age does not determine whether someone is a good parent. A child does not care how old a mother is. What a child wants is someone who provides, supports, and loves without conditions.

Then there is the support network, which usually runs deeper the later you have kids. By your late 30s you probably have relatives and friends itching to spoil a new baby, and many of them already have older or grown children of their own. Some may be retired, which translates to free hands for babysitting, trips to the amusement park, afternoons at Chuck E. Cheese. Not a bad arrangement. Younger mothers can absolutely have strong support systems too, so this is a tendency, not a rule.

Hand-me-downs come with that same network. Friends, relatives, even acquaintances line up to pass along clothes their own kids barely wore, along with a steady stream of parenting advice whether you asked for it or not. Because so many people around you have already been through it, your child rarely lacks for anything. A younger mother can have a harder time here, since her friends and relatives are often young too, fumbling through parenthood right alongside her.

Another one that surprises people is the sense of a second childhood. Having kids later lets you revisit your own, living a little through theirs. When was the last time you rode a roller coaster or spent an afternoon eating pizza and playing arcade games? For most people in their late 30s it has been a while. As a mother you get to do those things again, and precisely because it has been so long, they tend to land harder than they would have if you had become a parent at 22.

Last is perception. Reaching parenthood in your mid-to-late 30s means you bring a more weathered view of life, love, and raising a child. You see things differently than you did at 25. Choices that felt obviously smart back then may not look so smart now, because the years have reshaped how you read a situation. You are not the person you were, and with any luck the version of you doing the parenting makes steadier decisions.

Dr. R. Y. Langham. References include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2015), a 2014 Huffington Post piece on the benefits of having kids in your 30s, and J. Kever's 2008 Chron article, "Big benefits seen in motherhood later in life."