“Are people having kids too late” is making the rounds on my internetsphere again, and it makes me sad. If it makes me sad, it must be because it reminds me of my faults; otherwise I usually can keep The Discourse at a distance.

did we have kids too late

I think so. We started at 34, had first kid at 36, took off about a year and a half, and are still trying for kid 2 at 39. This is a bummer for a few reasons:

• if our kids have kids at the same age as us, we’ll have grandkids at … 72 and 80?? like, I still want to toss them in the air; maybe I still can at 72?! And by the time they’re 10 we’ll be 80-90. Yikes.
• it’s hard to make it happen! while you technically can have kids in your late 30s/early 40s, I do not recommend it! you may not know if you have fertility issues until you start and then it’s too late!
• it’s physically harder to have young kids at 39 than at 29, sure
• I’m not going to be done with young kids until my mid 40s and that is late

why did we have them so late

• ok having a career is important to us both, obv, this is like reason #1 that people delay having kids
• and having money helps with having kids, sure
• we were in SF, so there wasn’t sort of an ambient friends-having-kids that was happening
• I was really ambivalent about it (sigh maybe “husband doesn’t wanna” is reason #2 that people delay having kids. but at least a couple of transformative experiences got me to be ok with it in time
• well, the aforementioned difficulty; if we had our way, we’d have them at 34 and 36 and be done

what could we have done differently

We wanted at-least-somewhat-ambitious tech careers. This sort of implies moving to SF. Having kids in SF is very hard and we didn’t wanna. So we did the whole thing; work in the data mines, then come back to a cozy small city and have kids.

But the career thing. Before we met, I worked at google from 22-25. That was probably worth it; if you don’t know where to start a tech career, not a bad place. We met at 26, and at 33-34 we finally “had good careers.” We have some wealth now that we didn’t really build much until about then, then it took off - so to cut our career off before then would have been a bit of a waste. And before then we were sort of “entry level” more than “stable.”

So 34 is as early as we could have, right? No! Why did it take us 12 years to get our careers together? Because we both spent ~5 years in grad school!

Imagine if we didn’t do PhDs: we’d be “established”, done with our time in the data mines, with years of wealth built up, ready to move back and start a family, at 29!

So: unless you are a true believer in the academic world and want to be a professor¹, don’t do a PhD.

how broadly does this apply

I don’t know. It applies in the tech world, which is probably the most functional part of our economy. Probably in finance and other high-paying fields too; “build your career for 7 years before kids” is probably a pretty common thing. And in fields where you can get to a solid career in 7 years, you can actually do the thing that many of us want to: build a career, then have kids at 30.