Doddering Daddies
Do older fathers mean dumber kids?
According to a study released Monday, children of older fathers scored lower than those of younger fathers on I.Q. tests and a range of other cognitive measures. These results support growing evidence suggesting significant downfalls to delaying fatherhood.
While this was the first study to demonstrate that children of older fathers do not perform well on cognitive tests at young ages (8 months, 4 years and 7 years old), other research has identified higher rates of schizophrenia and autism among the offspring of men in their mid-to-late 40s or older when they had children.
The new study, published in PLoS Medicine, reanalyzed data from the federally sponsored Collaborative Perinatal Project, which gathered information from 50,000-plus pregnant women from 1959-1965. Fathers in the study were ages 14 to 66, while mothers were 12 to 48. Regardless of their mothers’ age, children whose fathers were 50 years old had lower scores on all tests except those assessing physical coordination, compared to children whose fathers were age 20. The older the fathers, the more likely the children were to have lower scores.
Will the May-December romance now go the way of, say, Bernie Madoff’s investments? How ironic that, through the ages, it’s been women who have agonized over having children “too late” in life. The same study also showed that children of older mothers typically performed better on cognitive tests, suggesting they may benefit from “the more nurturing home environments associated with the generally higher income and education levels of older mothers.”
For more on the study, see the New York Times article, ”Older Fathers Linked to Lower I.Q. Scores.”
