Until he met his wife, Trumbo, a sports instructor, had spent time with kids and liked them but rarely thought of having any. Now he looks forward to teaching his son what he's taught so many others.
You don't need to know my exact age. suffice it to say I was born during the Eisenhower Administration--and no, not the second term. I've never opened any letters from AARP, but that hasn't stopped them from showing up in my mailbox every month. I still pay full price at museums, and I will for a good while, but at least once I was offered the discount--and not the student kind.
I'm perfectly happy to tell you my daughters' ages: they're 10 and 12, and they're in fourth and sixth grades. That puts a whole lot of demographic real estate between us. I go to the drugstore to pick up Flintstones Chewables and hypertension medication. When I visit a salon to restore a bit of color to my graying hair, I'm the only man of a certain age who sometimes brings his kids along because the sitter wasn't available. My father was 25 when I was born; when I was 25, I was fresh out of school, serially dating and just beginning my career. Children were a matter for much, much later.
When I finally did get married and prepared to start a family, I reckoned I didn't have much to worry about. My wife is a generous number of years younger than I am. I come from a family of long-lived people. And plenty of other fit, fertile men have had kids far into middle age and beyond. Indeed, it's a powerful part of our evolutionary roots. Alpha males have long sired children with successively younger partners, staying in the mating game well after the beta boys have quit. In some cases paleo-fatherhood is practically a fashion statement, with no shortage of high-profile golden-agers pushing strollers. Paul McCartney was 61 when his last child was born. Clint Eastwood was 66. Tony Randall was 78. Steve Martin had his first child (with his 40-year-old wife) last December, at age 67. After all, sperm are all but indestructible, right?
The numbers seem to bear this out. From 1980 to 2009, new-dad rates in the U.S. rose 47% in the 35-to-39 age group and a whopping 61% in the 40-to-44 group. They even rose 18% among men 50 to 54. The trend is driven partly by America's high divorce rate, which leads to second marriages and second broods, and partly by dual-career couples, who often start families late. More important is the role of medicine. There are more procedures than ever to help ensure healthy pregnancies, and to the extent that middle-aged men bump up against reproductive problems, there are erectile-dysfunction meds to rev things up and procedures like intrauterine insemination to get a baby started.
"Men have had this 'I'm invincible' theory when it comes to reproduction," says social psychologist Susan Newman, who has written more than a dozen books on parenting and relationships. "The only thing they needed to worry about was sperm count."