Mom's having her first baby at 50 and Dad's starting on his third set of kids. What are these newfangled versions of mother and father teaching all of us about parenting?
For many of us teetering on the edge of the 21st century, there's something quaintly old-fashioned about Mother's Day and Father's Day, and it's not only the flowery odes and cards. It's that two days don't seem enough anymore. Two days--a single date in May, 24 hours in June--may once have been adequate to celebrate motherhood and fatherhood, simple and solid as they were then. But in an age of surrogate mothers and single fathers, stepparents and "social" parents, lesbian moms and long-distance dads, we'd need weeks to do everyone justice.
In this welter of new ways to be mom or dad, one question often gets overlooked: how have these permutations changed parenting itself? Have the man-made miracles of assisted reproduction drawn mothers and children closer together, or pushed them farther apart? Have the social shifts of the the last 30 years made men better fathers, or made them more likely to leave?
In this special section, Frederic Golden and Annie Murphy Paul take a look at postmodern parenting: what it means for moms and dads, for their children, and for the rest of us.
MOMS
It may be the world's second-oldest profession, as Erma Bombeck once wryly called it, but there's a lot that's new about motherhood these days. Reproductive technology is permitting postmenopausal women to become pregnant, bestowing twins and triplets on women who thought they were infertile, creating families with two mothers and no fathers, save an anonymous sperm donor. But have these innovations changed how moms do what they've always done: raise and nurture children? Here, a look at today's high-tech motherhood:
Test-Tube Moms
Since the first baby conceived through in-vitro fertilization--Louise Joy Brown, now 21 years old--hundreds of thousands of lives have had their start in petri dishes. There are enough IVF children around, in fact, for psychologists to begin studying them and their parents.
The results: so far, so good. The mothering given to children conceived through assisted reproductive technology, or ART, is just as effective as that given to naturally conceived children--and maybe more. Research shows that ART mothers express greater warmth toward their children, are more emotionally involved with them, interact with them more, experience less stress related to parenting and report greater feelings of parental competence.
That may be because their children were so desperately wanted. "People who are willing to go through infertility treatments, which can be very expensive and can stretch over many years, are those who are really committed to becoming parents," says Susan Golombok, Ph.D., of City University in London, a leading researcher in the field. "Then when they do become parents, they've waited so long for their children that they're just thrilled to have them."
The time and expense involved in ART influences those who use it in another way: they are likely to be older and more affluent than mothers in the general population, and for that reason may be able to offer their children advantages that younger, poorer mothers cannot. Dorothy Greenfeld, M.D., an obstetrician at the Yale University School of Medicine, finds that these mothers' marriages may actually be the stronger for their trials: "They've had to look at issues that one could argue other couples don't face, and work through them together," she says.
ART mothers may also feel personally empowered by the process, by the fact that they had any choices at all about how to treat their infertility. The advances of ART can be seen as cousin to the contraceptives developed earlier in this century that allowed women for the first time to control when they became pregnant. Like the Pill, assisted reproductive technology has allowed women who would once have been at the mercy of their anatomies to have biology at their beck and call.
Older Moms
ART has also been a boon to mothers who are not so much infertile as post-fertile: those who are past menopause but still want to bear children. The implantation of donor eggs has allowed women to become pregnant at ages far beyond what we think of as a woman's childbearing years: 50, 55, even 63 in the case of a California woman who lied to her doctor about her age.
As the age at which American women first become mothers rises ever higher, postmenopausal women who conceive with the help of ART are on the leading edge, enacting in exaggerated form the delights and drawbacks of delayed childbearing.
There are still too few of these mothers to support systematic study, but early observation suggests that many of the qualities typical of mothers who use assisted reproductive technology--greater wealth and life experience, a profound commitment to parenting, a grateful joy born of the long wait for a child--are found in older ART moms as well. Pregnancy and childbirth are harder on the health of older mothers, however, and the physical demands of caring for young children may exhaust them more easily.
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