Older fathers make dumber babies?
According to a recent report on an old study, we should expect to see warnings to prospective fathers to start their families early, while prospective mothers will be warned to hold off. I don’t know how they could possibly conclude that older fathers were linked to poor performance on test results in infancy and early childhood. However, older mothers were linked to better performance on the same tests. The study was done on children born between 1959 and 1965 and tests were carried out when they were 8 months, 4 years, and 7 years old. Factors such as family income and parental education were adjusted for. They found that with increasing paternal age, the performance worsened. On the other hand, with increasing maternal age, the performance improved. Previously, they had thought that older mothers provided a more nurturing environment which encouraged learning. However, they felt that this study proved a genetic link as well. This was in part because family income, which contributes to socioeconomic environment, was already accounted for. Although the effect of maturity on women’s fertility had been well-studied, the effect of paternal age had not. They had previously linked older fathers to some health problems, including birth defects and neuropsychiatric problems like schizophrenia, autism and bipolar disorder. But this new study indicates that as men age, so do their sperm, which could cause genetic defects. Scientists are worried that the trend of delaying having children will cause older parents, which could increase genetic disorders. The report did not state at what age these scientists consider ‘old’. They did imply that the test scores were inversely related to the age of the father, and directly related to the age of the mother. Now, considering a child has two parents, how did they separate the test results for each side like they did? It would have to be assumed that the children fell into one of four categories: older mother/younger father, older mother/older father, younger mother/younger father, and younger mother/older father. The first group would have performed the best and the last group would have performed the worst. But what about the middle two groups? That is essential in determining the link between paternal/maternal age to the test results. Wouldn’t one advantage be offset by the other disadvantage? Or did they look at each of those categories individually and rank the children in performance? If they did that, did they then apply it to the entire group as a whole to determine which parental pairing is the most advantageous for intelligence. More importantly, why did they not carry the study into adulthood and see what other problems they developed, or whether the intelligence improved or deteriorated? This study was done in the 1970s, but the findings were just released. It makes me wonder if they would have the same results today. I remain incompletely convinced.
