Laboratory

Fertility and Well-Being

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Costs and Gains of Postponing Parenthood

Conducted by Mikko Myrskylä; Susie Lee, Kieron Barclay, Pekka Martikainen (MPIDR / University of Helsinki, Finland); in Collaboration with Martin Kolk (Stockholm University, Sweden), Irma T. Elo (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA), Ruben C. Arslan (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany), Alice Goisis (University College London, United Kingdom), Kai Willführ (Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany), Berkay Özcan (London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom)

Detailed Description

Maternal and paternal ages at birth are increasing across the developed world, giving rise to concerns about the individual- and population-level effects of fertility postponement on the health of parents and offspring. We analyze how parental age at the time of childbearing is associated with individual-level outcomes for both parents and their children, which mechanisms might be responsible for these associations, and whether these relationships are causal. We seek to distinguish the separate contributions of parental biological aging, resource accumulation, and changing period conditions to the association between parental age and child outcomes.

We study a wide range of outcomes for the offspring of older parents, including their cognitive ability, health, education, career success, and mortality. We also examine whether the age at childbearing and the number of children affect the mortality of the parents themselves. We use methods that compare siblings to account for unobserved parental characteristics. To cover a wide range of contexts in which the relative importance of aging, resources, and period conditions might differ, we use large population-based samples from the US register-based data from Scandinavian countries, Demographic and Health Surveys, and other sources.

Publications

Aradhya, S.; Tegunimataka, A.; Kravdal, Ø.; Martikainen, P.; Myrskylä, M.; Barclay, K. J.; Goisis, A.:

Maternal age and the risk of low birthweight and pre-term delivery: a pan-Nordic comparison

International Journal of Epidemiology 52:1, 156–164. (2023)    

Lee, D. S.; Nitsche, N.; Barclay, K. J.:

Body mass index in early adulthood and transition to first birth: racial/ethnic and sex differences in the United States NLSY79 cohort

Population Studies, 1–21. (2022)    

Barclay, K. J.; Kolk, M.:

Parity and mortality: an examination of different explanatory mechanisms using data on biological and adoptive parents

European Journal of Population 35:1, 63–85. (2019)    

Einiö, E.; Goisis, A.; Myrskylä, M.:

Is the relationship between men's age at first birth and midlife health changing? Evidence from two British cohorts

SSM-Population Health 8:100458, 1–10. (2019)    

Arslan, R. C.; Willführ, K. P.; Frans, E. M.; Verweij, K. J. H.; Bürkner, P.-C.; Myrskylä, M.; Voland, E.; Almqvist, C.; Zietsch, B. P.; Penke, L.:

Relaxed selection and mutation accumulation are best studied empirically: reply to Woodley of Menie et al.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 285:1873, 20180092–20180092. (2018)    

Arslan, R. C.; Willführ, K. P.; Frans, E. M.; Verweij, K. J. H.; Bürkner, P.-C.; Myrskylä, M.; Voland, E.; Almqvist, C.; Zietsch, B. P.; Penke, L.:

Correction to: reply to Woodley of Menie et al.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 285:1884, 20181427–20181427. (2018)    

Barclay, K. J.; Myrskylä, M.:

Parental age and offspring mortality: negative effects of reproductive ageing may be counterbalanced by secular increases in longevity

Population Studies 72:2, 157–173. (2018)    

Goisis, A.; Remes, H. M.; Barclay, K. J.; Martikainen, P.; Myrskylä, M.:

Paternal age and the risk of low birth weight and preterm delivery: a Finnish register-based study

Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 72:12, 1104–1109. (2018)    

Goisis, A.; Schneider, D. C.; Myrskylä, M.:

Secular changes in the association between advanced maternal age and the risk of low birth weight: a cross-cohort comparison in the UK

Population Studies 72:3, 381–397. (2018)    

Arslan, R. C.; Willführ, K. P.; Frans, E. M.; Verweij, K. J. H.; Bürkner, P.-C.; Myrskylä, M.; Voland, E.; Almqvist, C.; Zietsch, B. P.; Penke, L.:

Older fathers' children have lower evolutionary fitness across four centuries and in four populations

Proceedings of the Royal Society of London/B 284:1862, 20171562–20171562. (2017)    

Goisis, A.; Özcan, B.; Myrskylä, M.:

Decline in the negative association between low birth weight and cognitive ability

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114:1, 84–88. (2017)    

Goisis, A.; Remes, H. M.; Barclay, K. J.; Martikainen, P.; Myrskylä, M.:

Advanced maternal age and the risk of low birth weight and preterm delivery: a within-family analysis using Finnish population registers

American Journal of Epidemiology 186:11, 1219–1226. (2017)    

Goisis, A.; Schneider, D. C.; Myrskylä, M.:

The reversing association between advanced maternal age and child cognitive ability: evidence from three UK birth cohorts

International Journal of Epidemiology 46:3, 850–859. (2017)    

Myrskylä, M.; Barclay, K. J.; Goisis, A.:

Advantages of later motherhood

Der Gynäkologe 50:10, 767–772. (2017)    

Barclay, K. J.; Keenan, K.; Grundy, E.; Kolk, M.; Myrskylä, M.:

Reproductive history and post-reproductive mortality: a sibling comparison analysis using Swedish register data

Social Science and Medicine 155, 82–92. (2016)    

Barclay, K. J.; Myrskylä, M.:

Maternal age and offspring health and health behaviours in late adolescence in Sweden

SSM-Population Health 2, 68–76. (2016)