“When is baby number three coming now that the royals have set the standard?” A loose-mouthed colleague asked me after Katherine, the Duchess of Cambridge and her husband Prince William made the grand announcement. I just sneered and walked away.
This has been the new nagging question everybody who think they are close to me have been throwing at me casually. It is annoying because the only person who has a right to ask this intrusive question is Baba Tasha, the stakeholder in this baby making business. But strange enough, he gave up on this. He realised a long time ago that I am not the type to be pushed and coerced to have a child. For now, I am preoccupied with so many other life issues, baby making is not a priority.
But since the news broke that Kate is expecting her third child, every mother with two kids is suddenly being tormented and reminded how they are doing the world a disfavour by not “doing something”, like my brother-in-law always tells me. There’s even greater pressure after the queen of socialites Kim Kardashian also announced they will be getting their third addition in December. Beyonce also has a brood of three. It seems like three is the new two but am I ready to have a third child?
For an extremely busy career mother like me, who has not hit jackpot in her career yet, telling me to get baby number three is a crisis. Though Tasha is nine and Troy three, I feel I am not yet ready to say three yet. Two is tidy and neat, but three is chaos, for now.
What even encourages me to delay this third child-bearing is the fact that being an older mother has been shown to come with benefits. Gone are the days when we were being terrorised by the biological clock that never stopped ticking. Research has now shown that there are myriad benefits of having a child after 35. According to a study in the International Journal of Epidemiology children born from an older mother are brighter. The researchers looked at evidence from three different studies and in the first study done years back, it showed that maternal age 35-39 at birth was associated with poorer cognitive scores in the children, tested a decade later.
Children born to mothers 25-29 did better. But with new study had more encouraging news, the children born to the 35- to 39-year-olds did significantly better on the cognitive testing than the children born to younger mothers.
Clearly something drastic had shifted over the years. The mothers in the first study were financially unstable while the later study the mums were more economically empowered.
A study in Denmark by The European Journal of Developmental Psychology shows that children born of older mothers are taller and smarter.
The study found that those born to older mothers were more physically fit, had better grades and at least a small height advantage over people born to young mothers. So no baby three just yet...
The writer is a married working mother of a toddler boy and a pre-school girl. She shares her experience of juggling between career, family and social life.