Although life expectancy was a lot lower in the past than today that was mostly due to infant mortality. It's true that a lot of women died during childbirth, which meant that the life expectancy of women was less than that of men (I think), but I would guess that a woman who survived giving birth to at least one child who survived probably had a "reasonable" chance of surviving to 60 or 70. So I don't think great-grandmothers would have been that unusual in the past.
The window for great-grandmothers is closing
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Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing
#12My wife is only a few years younger than I am, but she still has all of her grandparents. They are around age 80.
I didn't have my first child until I was almost 40, and my grandmother on my father's side died the week we were going to tell everyone that we were having a kid. My other three grandparents all died in the 1990's.
Also, many of my cousins had kids before they were 20, some of them became grandparents before I even became a parent. And likewise, I ended up with aunts/uncles that became great-grandparents before my dad became a grandparent.
Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing
#13If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents. My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plen…
My family has really long generations. Going back 7 generations for me patrilinearly is exactly 280 years; 40 years per generation. When I was young my grandparents were already in their 80s and both grandfathers gone before I was 14. Sadly, both had mental decline (stroke, Alzheimers) and I never knew them in their right mind. They'd be in their 110s today. The idea of knowing my great-grandparents, who would be in their 140s-150s today, is basically unthinkable for me.
Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing
#14I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties. That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.
If that were the case, then the demographics data would not show a major shift. It would just bias of a relatively small group.
However, demographic data clearly shows a trend over the past several decades. Look up "Mean Age of New Mother" statistics. E.g. here's data from the US: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db232.pdf It's more dramatic if you extend the data back to the 70's. You can see the same trend in most countries.
On average, people are having their first children at a significantly older age than a couple of generations ago.
That doesn't mean that folks _aren't_ having children early at all. E.g. I have _tons_ of friends that had kids as teenagers (and a lot at 14, too) and were already grandparents years ago in their 30's. But that's not representative of the overall population.
This means that children knowing their great grandparents really is becoming more rare today than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing
#15At this rate even grandparents...
Most of my (37) friends in Italy does not have children. Some of us are late children so the parents are between 70 and 80.
Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing
#16I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties. That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.
"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."
- Jesus
Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing
#17i think an interesting orthogonal trend is how changes in family size affect grandparent relationships.
my grandparents were in the generation that had lots of kids, which leads to lots of grandkids. that meant that family gatherings were huge crowds where they served as a figureheads and i didn't really develop a one-on-one relationship with them.
but when i look just one generation removed, i see smaller family sizes so grandparents have far fewer grandkids. and they're developing actual relationships with their grandchildren in a completely different way.
Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing
#18I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties. That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.
It's very anecdotal. There are countries where the average age of first childbirth is still in the early 20s, and countries like Switzerland, where it's over 30. Among western countries, it looks like the median age for a mother's first child has gone up about 5 years in the past 50 years, which obviously reduces the likelihood of a great-grandparent even with increasing longevity offsets, but it's still going to hap…
Longevity plays a big role. My grandmother is 96 and grandfather 94, so even with a first child at 29 they’ve still had over a decade with their great grands. I had 6 great grandparents still alive when I was growing up. My parents were young, so will probably be in their 70s for great grand kids and if they make it near 100, could see great-greats (wild!).
Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing
#19I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties. That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.
Absolutely, but for some reason pointing this out is considered massively classist in some quarters. I don't really think it's classist to say that if people who don't value science, think climate change is fake, fear outsiders, etc. have 6 kids, and people who hold different have 1 or none, it will have a large impact on public policy in a generation.
Pointing out differences in age of first child for different groups (race, class, etc.) is not necessarily classist. It's the part that so often comes next, "therefore, we should..." that causes offense.
Anyway, what's wrong with having 6 kids? People used to do it all the time and society was fine. Why shouldn't we set up our society in a way that allows this as a reasonable possibility?
Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing
#20Aren't life expectancy at birth figures heavily skewed by infant mortality rates. I think this is quite a commonly misunderstood statistic for this reason. So while it's true that in the past a new born baby's chances of becoming a great grandparent were much lower than they would be today, that would mainly be due to the low chances of them ever reaching adulthood and becoming a parent at all, rather than the chance…
Exactly. While life expectancy from adulthood (say 20 yo) has increased (i.e. UK males have gone from expected average 60y to 80y between 1841 to 2011 [1]), it hasn't increased nearly as much as the life expectancy from birth (i.e. 33% vs 98% increase over that period).
[1]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...