According to Nebraska Medical Center, ideally, fathers should finish their family by 40. It is quite risky for fathers over forty to have a child with an autosomal dominant mutation. Fathers over fifty were found to have a twenty percent greater incidence of producing a baby born with serious defects.
A research scientist has been looking into male infertility and remains unconvinced by the American findings on sperm quality.
They get men over sixty coming in for semen analysis and their sperm is no different from that of 20-year-old added the scientist. After 55, sperm numbers significantly reduce. Furthermore he takes the traditional view, maintaining that sperm quality is influenced by factors other than age. Alcohol, smoking, stress, diet, and large levels of cadmium and lead can affect sperm, Heavy alcoholics and cocaine users experience the severest drop in sperm production added research scientist.
According to studies, men are productivity better built than women, sperm are produced every minute of the day, each sperm taking 72 days to evolve. A man produces 200-400 million sperm a day- and it only needs one to fertilize an egg. This goes some way to explained why traditionally it has been more socially acceptable for men to "spread their seed"; it’s all in the name of procreation.
Author of the Rites of Man: love, sex and death in the making of the male, believes that encountering paternal death sooner rather than later makes a great deal of difference to a child. So, if the father is approaching that age, it’s likely that parental loss will occur just when the child is supposed to having the best time of her or his life. This can lead to awful emotional difficulties, apart from the understandable grief. It can result in terrible feelings of guilt and anger.
Nowadays, economic factors like money, jobs, maternity leave and child care play as even greater part in determining when is the right time to reproduce.
The older father will often become "Big Daddy", showering gifts on the daughter and spoiling her. Treating her as "his baby". The relationship will either be intensely paternalistic or lover-like. The more the older father invests in his daughter, the more difficult it will be for her daughter to become independent.
An older father only grows older and, as his daughter’s life is expanding, he is contracting. When he is post-menopausal, she is becoming a woman.
Beating the clock
Nowadays, economic factors like jobs, maternity leave, money and child care play an even greater part in determining when it is right time to reproduce. As women, it can be galling to feel there is a further pressing factor: the biological clock. The facts that biology may not be so favorable to men either is one that, curiously, has been all but ignored up to now. According to psychology adviser, as long as women are conscious of their biological clock, while men regard themselves as immune, this will remain a potential source of conflict and of women’s resentment. But if men start to become more conscious of their own internal ticking the two sexes will gain understanding of each other.
Labels: the male biological clock
