Whens the best time to start a family 1260x542
28 Mar 2011

When is the best time to start a family?

1 mins to read
Biologically, women are most fertile in their twenties and from a medical perspective this is the best time to conceive.


Biologically, women are most fertile in their twenties and from a medical perspective this is the best time to conceive.

Nowadays, if you conceive in your twenties, you are considered a ’young mum’; the majority of women are now starting a family in their early to mid-thirties. Factors such as career, travel, finances and finding the right partner all contribute to leaving it until later to have children.

My own mother was 21 when I was born, and this was generally considered normal for this time. I honestly cannot imagine myself becoming a parent at twenty-one. When I was this age, I was finishing my tertiary education, had travel plans and felt the world was ripe with possibilities and opportunities. Having a child at that time would have meant I was tied down. Plus, how could I ever have afforded it?!

And now, as I approach 30, I realise that while my body may have been ready then, I don’t think I was mentally or emotionally ready to be the best parent I could be. Financially, it may never be the perfect time, but I believe that there comes a point where all your life experience comes together for you to realise that while you can never really prepare for becoming a parent, you at least have some understanding about what it takes.

While the answer to the commonly asked question ‘when is the right time’ might be ‘whenever you are ready’, we still need to remember our biology. The risk of miscarriage, pre-term delivery, perinatal abnormalities and other complications all increase as we get older. So maybe we could answer the big question more accurately as ‘whenever you are ready, but the younger the better’.

Are you a “young mum”? How did you know you were ready to become a parent? Or did you wait until you had ticked all of life’s boxes to have a child? Do you now wish you had done it sooner?



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