What's With '11th-Hour' Baby Fever?
Photo: Splash News
In Jennifer Lopez’s new interview with People, the singer dishes about dating, romance and children: the ones she has and the ones she still wants. That’s right, 45-year-old single mother of 6-year-old twins Max and Emme, wants more babies – preferably twins. “I have two happy healthy kids, so okay, good, we’re doing all right,” the actress tells the magazine. “[And] I don’t know if it’s in the cards for me because of my age, but I would love to have another baby, to be blessed one more time. I’d love to have twins again.”
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Lopez isn’t alone in her yearning. Two years ago, at age 40, actress Gwyneth Paltrow copped to having baby fever when her daughter Apple was 8 and son Moses, was 6. “My brain says, “Oh, I think I’m done, the kids are big now and I don’t want to go back to changing diapers,” she told InStyle. “But a part of me would love to have another.” And Nicole Kidman recently revealed her baby pangs during an interview with an Australian radio station. “I’m baby crazy,” she said. “I hope every month that I’m pregnant, but I never am. I would be jumping for joy if it happens. [But] I’m 47, it won’t happen.”
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This idea of mothers yearning to raise babies later in life isn’t just a Hollywood trend. “It’s a phenomenon across the board,” social psychologist Susan Newman, Ph.D. tells Yahoo Parenting. “40 has become the new 20 for having babies.”
Statistics show, in fact, that since 2000, the birth rate for women in their early 40s has risen steadily by 2 percent per year (save for a 1 percent dip in 2013). The birth rate for women aged 45 to 49 rose as well in 2012, reports the Centers for Disease Control, for the first time since 2008.
One explanation Newman offers is the quest for youth. “Older moms could want to feel younger,” she says. “There’s no question that having a baby when you’re older is rejuvenating. You’re going to be playing Shoots and Ladders and going to Little League games.”
As a result, “they’ll have to up their level of energy,” adds Newman of the later-in-life second or third time moms. The bonus? “People may perceive that you’re the age you feel.”
Or, it might be about exercising the freedom to enjoy motherhood with the added bonus of experience.
“I don’t think this is so much an issue of not being able to face the end of their fertility as much as it’s women wanting a second chance to use the knowledge they’ve gained,” Ready: Why Women Are Embracing the New Later Motherhood author Elizabeth Gregory tells Yahoo Parenting. “They’re enjoying their first kids and want to have more. They may have found it’s actually a lot of fun and satisfying on lots of levels.”
The fact that there are many medical options for women to re-embrace motherhood later in life, gives these moms the freedom to expand their families at any time. “There isn’t an end to fertility in the way there used to be,” explains Gregory, director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Houston.
As Kidman explained, “My grandmother had her last baby at 49 [though] so you never know.”
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