Dear old(er) Dad

When our son was younger, we would ask him questions we thought he didn't know the answer to, just to hear the funny answers he would come up with.

This is how I know that at one point my son believed that you had to get a license to become a grown-up, that Mommy's favorite activity was cooking dinner and that Daddy's age was either 10 or 230. I loved thinking about his perspective as he came up with each of these answers.

Now that he is a little older, he knows that you are going to grow up no matter what, cooking can be fun but sometimes it is just about getting necessary fuel into our bodies, and what our real ages are. For that last discussion, we even pulled out the scrapbooks and showed him what we looked like BC (before child). (Side note: I was happy when he didn't comment on how much older we look now.)

From my perspective, I sometimes marvel at the younger version of us in those pictures. While we don't look too different, we do seem...younger. (Maybe it's our pre-parenting innocence.) I don't recall thinking much about our ages when we decided to become parents. I was well below the "high risk" age of 35 and my wonderful husband was in his early 30s.

But maybe the age of both parents really does matter. A recent study out of Stanford has taken a closer look at the age shift of men's first-time fatherhood. There is a definite shift to waiting a little longer to have that first baby. But I think there are too many reasons to sort out why: Maybe they are waiting for their partner to be ready (women are having babies later in life, too), or maybe they are waiting to feel more financially secure, or waiting for their career to settle enough that they have time back in their lives to spend with a family, or any of a hundred other reasons.

Because the thing to remember is that the decision to have a baby is a personal one - for women and men.

What age were you when you were ready for parenthood? Share the magic number in the comments.