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.
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The U.S. may be the world's leading manufacturer of elderly dads, but it's not alone. In England and Wales, the average age of fatherhood has risen from 29 to 32 since 1980; in Iceland it has gone from 28 to 33. In Japan numbers are elusive since surveys of paternal age began only in 2008. But anecdotally the average appears to be on the rise, with the poor economy causing men to delay fathering children. Like older American dads, however, older Japanese men shrug at the risk. "I don't see major difficulties about being a senior father," says Yokohama resident Seishi Yoda, 71, who is retired and raising two children, ages 6 and 2. "I'm careful about my health. I'm doing many sports such as swimming." Having kids late may even be a patriotic duty: "I want to help increase Japan's shrinking population," he says.
China and India have no such underpopulation problem, nor do they have an old-dad boom. But they're hurtling toward one. The long-standing preference for boy babies over girls in both countries, and the selective abortions and offshore adoptions of daughters that have resulted, has produced a young population that is disproportionately male. As those children reach marriage age, the competition for wives will be keen, and many men will take a long time to settle down or won't get married at all. "It takes longer for men to establish themselves," says Radhika Chopra, a professor of sociology at the University of Delhi. This is making old dads with very young kids an increasingly common sight in Indian society. Says Chopra: "It is not a stigma as much as a slight giggle."
That giggle galls some women, at least in the U.S. Even as scientists raise the alarm over the perils of eroded sperm, men face none of the barrage of health warnings directed at older moms. There's not a mother around who didn't feel a sense of lifestyle scrutiny during pregnancy if she forgot her folic acid or sneaked a glass of wine. But men, the sole caretakers of the sperm, have gotten a free ride.
"There's a scare that's constantly put into women but not men," says Robin Gorman Newman, 52, founder of Motherhood Later ... than Sooner, an organization for older moms. She and her husband adopted a child 10 years ago after a round of fertility treatments proved fruitless. "You walk into a fertility doctor's office and they start rattling off the dangers, but the whole time they're looking at the woman."
Veronique Christory, 44, got her scolding after her kids came along. A Swiss-born arms expert with the International Committee of the Red Cross's U.N. delegation, she had four children from age 29 to 36. That put her pregnancies in the safe zone except for the last, which slipped just past the much publicized threshold of 35. And she heard about it. "After the last was born," she says, "people kept coming up to me and telling me how lucky I was that there had been no problems."