Older Parenthood: The Real Story

By the time Catherine Boyer’s son graduates from college, she will be heading into her late 60s. Her husband will be nearly 70.

“They’ll have to wheel me into commencement,” she sometimes jokes, albeit a bit nervously.

At 49, Boyer is the graying mother of a 4-year-old, already occasionally mistaken for his grandmother.

Like other baby boomers who delayed parenthood, she will spend the next two decades defying contemporary ideas of aging. There will be no empty nest, no shedding of familial responsibilities and expense.

Instead she will slip into senior citizenhood merging the domestic and financial roles of the young and old, ignoring the boundaries of age.

“The notion of worker and retiree and family life stages--all of these things are being blurred,” says Cornell University sociologist Phyllis Moen. “I think in the long run it’s good. It provides more options for us all.”

It will also present its share of challenges.

The boomers did not invent older parenthood. But they will practice it under pressures created by converging economic and social trends.

Children stay dependent on their parents longer than they used to. College is more expensive and more critical to middle-class status than in the past. Compared with the experiences of the World War II generation, job security is more elusive, retirement funding more tenuous and sacrifice less fashionable.

In some cases boomers will be squeezed from both ends, caring for dependent children as well as elderly parents with longer life expectancies.

And, in many cases, they are ill-prepared for it all, maintains Ken Dychtwald, whose Northern California research and marketing firm, Age Wave Inc., follows “maturing populations.”

“I think if there’s one area where we’re really fooling ourselves, it’s in the area of financial security,” says Dychtwald, who didn’t become a father until he was 37. “We just don’t add up the numbers.”

Over the coming years, he predicts boomers will “find themselves with enormous child-care and parent-care burdens and many won’t be able to afford to retire,” or will have to postpone their retirement until their late 60s or early 70s.

Indeed, as they lower their middle-aged bodies into nursery school chairs, retirement can be a very fuzzy notion for the late-parent set, which makes up a distinct and growing minority: 5.5% of all first births were to women 35 and older in 1993, compared with 1% in 1970.

“We’re just trying to keep our heads above water now,” acknowledges Mimi Pond, a 40-year-old cartoonist and humor writer who lives in Silver Lake with her husband, Wayne White, 39, and their two children, 1 and 4.

Pond has a retirement kitty. “But I haven’t added anything to that money for quite some time,” she says.

“You have to think positively,” she insists. “Otherwise, you’d wind up taking some horrible office job.”

Boyer, who also lives in Silver Lake and does freelance film script development, says she and her husband, a freelance film editor and director, can barely imagine retiring. “I just kind of assume I’ll work until I drop.”

Easier said than done, suggests Kitty O’Keefe.

“People are getting to be a little burned out in my experience,” says O’Keefe, a Southern California financial planner. “I don’t think they want to keep working at the pace they are for the next 20 years. I guess I just find that to be disturbing.”

She sees the boomers saddled by enormous college costs for their children and a retirement system increasingly dependent on private savings, as opposed to the Social Security and reliable company pensions that cushioned the final decades of their parents.

Moreover, the work force may not want elderly boomers, no matter how eager they are to remain in it.

“The problem is that if we continue even moderately in this downsizing pattern we’re in, that option [of working longer] may not exist,” O’Keefe points out.

With companies now shedding workers in their 40s and 50s, just how realistic is it to expect jobs for 65- and 70-year-olds?

Perhaps more so than it seems, suggest Dychtwald and Moen. As the wave of boomers reshapes concepts of age, they may manage to mold the workplace to their needs, rather than the reverse.

“A lot of people want to keep working, need to keep working,” Dychtwald says. “I do think we will be much more accustomed to hiring 60-year-olds or 70-year-olds by the time we get there than we have been.”

Moreover, many--though by no means all--couples who choose later parenthood are financially comfortable. The rates for first births to women 30 to 44 are highest for educated professionals with larger incomes, according to federal health statistics.

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For now, this group is too intoxicated with parenthood to fret much about the financial future.

“When people are having children or even adopting children . . . they don’t play out the scenario of 20 years down the road,” says Moen, who studies retirement issues.

Thrilled to forsake meals out and weekend sleepathons for “Lion King” videos and Saturday mornings on the swing set, these midlife mom and dads say parenting suits them better in their middle years than it would have when they were younger.

“We did our crazy stuff in our 20s and 30s,” actor Patrick Cupo, 44, says of himself and his wife, Madeline, 43, who had their first child last year--after 23 years of marriage. “Now it’s cool to stay home and rent a movie.”

When psychologist Jana Martin, 42, of Long Beach, contemplated her parenting time line, she saw her age as a plus.

“I don’t have the anxiety of ‘What am I going to do when my kids grow up?’ ” says Martin, who has a 2-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter.

“I don’t have to worry about building my career or fighting hard to get where I want to be,” she says. “I think that allows me much more energy to deal with and enjoy being a parent. To me it is a tremendous advantage.”

Similarly, her 50-year-old husband, Jerry, says he is more patient than he would have been in his younger years.

If there is a loser in the competition between boomer retirement needs, the late launching of children with full middle-class trappings and helping out elderly parents, history suggests it will not be the children.

USC gerontology and sociology professor Vern L. Bengtson says that in following a 25-year study of families, he has seen parents consistently put their financial interests last, after those of their children and their own parents.

What’s more, he says children usually benefit when parenthood is deliberately delayed.

“My feeling is, these kids are advantaged,” Bengtson says. “They are desired, planned for. Their nursery and pre-kindergarten days have been more carefully attended than perhaps any birth cohort in recent history.”

Likewise, Norval Glenn, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies both aging and families, says anecdotal research suggests that older parents are often unusually good parents. “It’s largely a matter of maturity.”

Still, Glenn says, it remains to be seen if the boomers follow that pattern, since by traditional standards they have generally been less willing to sacrifice for their children than previous generations.

“We are a generation where we really do want it all,” says Helen Dennis, a lecturer at the Andrus Gerontology Center at USC. “Families want dual careers. We want here-and-now amenities and comforts. And we want a secure future.”

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To the extent that these graying parents brood over the future, the focus tends to be personal rather than financial.

“I am always deeply concerned about my mortality,” admits Boyer, who at one point colored her hair, afraid her son would think her too old. “That’s one of the things you have to wrestle with when you have a child at a ripe ol’ age--that you may not be able to spend as many years together.

“Whatever time we get,” she adds, “is much more worth it than not having it at all.”

Unlike previous generations--whose midlife offspring usually formed the tail end of a large family--the midlife boomer kids will grow up with one or two siblings, or alone. There will be no clutch of older brothers and sisters to offer guidance and support if their parents die.

“I get depressed when I think about how old I’ll be when he’s a teenager,” Billy Weber, Boyer’s husband, says of their son, Jacob. “Maybe everything will be fine. But that’s what I worry about. I don’t worry about money. . . . I just want to live long enough so he can be on his own and feel confident about it.”

Patricia Greenfield, a UCLA professor of psychology, says it’s hard to predict children’s reactions to having older parents.

Sometimes they “become nervous that their parents are going to die,” she says. “But I also have known cases where they feel more secure because the parents are more mature.”

Patti Friedel, 43, who lives in Brentwood with husband Ted and their 4-year-old son, has her own perspective on mortality.

Her mother, who was 15 when she was born, died in her 30s of a brain aneurysm.

During her mother’s life, Friedel saw the downside of young parenting without help or money. “I have a terrible, sad vision of my mother always at the ironing board crying” from exhaustion, she says.

She doesn’t recall her parents ever having had the leisure to read a book or to play much with their children.

In contrast, Friedel, an interior designer, and her 50-year-old husband, a money manager, have domestic help, plenty of financial stability and time to devote to their son, Christopher.

If anything troubles the Friedels, it is the potential for raising a spoiled prince.

“That was probably our biggest concern--an only child with older parents” who could wind up getting “anything he wants,” says Patti Friedel.

So they don’t give him everything he wants.

Compared with their circle of friends, Friedel says they tend to be tougher disciplinarians. And she has not forgotten her blue-collar roots, carefully limiting the number of presents Christopher gets at Christmas.

As for Boyer, she knows there’s one thing her son won’t get from her: a cross-country tour.

“I’m past road trips,” she says. “We’ll just fly to the Air and Space Museum.”