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Although nothing is wrong with a little preparation, planning your life down to the last detail can become discouraging. What happens when you’re 30 and still unmarried? At this point, you planned to have at least your first child, but sometimes life gets in the way and instead you hear the incessant ticking of your biological clock.

Soon, the fear of being an older parent starts festering in your mind. Who could blame you? As Joanna Montgomery from The Stir shares, older parents have a bigger age gap between their children as well as an increased risk of being a burden in the future. Older parents even find it hard to make other mom and dad friends.

READ MORE: Why I’m Grateful for My ‘Tiger Mom’

But what if you didn’t want to have children that young in the first place? How do you feel then? What happens when you’ve lived half a century and are finally ready to have kids?

Rachel Lehmann Haupt, author of “In Her Own Sweet Time: Egg Freezing and the New Frontiers of Family,” tells The New York Times that nowadays, “More women and men who are 50 or over are pushing the envelope and taking the leap into parenthood.”

Because of the astonishing rate of technological advances, people are living longer and the path to parenthood is often anything but conventional. Dr. Philip Chenette, a reproductive endocrinologist at the San Francisco Pacific Fertility Center, tells The New York Times, “People are so much healthier today … if you keep a good diet and keep your weight down, you can do a lot of things with your body that you couldn’t do before.”

READ MORE: The Power of Having Other Moms as Resources

Additionally, there are now solutions to those who hear the call of their “biological clocks” but don’t have active partners. People can now adopt, consider surrogacy or choose in-vitro fertilization with donor eggs or frozen eggs. However, CNN explains that there are downsides to these choices. Women who want to get pregnant often need to rely on IVF and egg donations, which could cost as much as $25,000 to $30,000. Additionally, the older the woman is, the greater her risk of hypertension, diabetes and death.

So while older moms often experience the physical and financial problems associated with pregnancy, they are also likely to be stigmatized as “selfish” or judged for being “too old.” CNN explains that older parents often hear comments like, “Could you really have had this kid?” or “Why would you adopt at such an old age?”

For this reason, becoming an older parent is a monumental decision.

READ MORE: How Your Relationship With Your Mother Can Shape Your Life

For example, Merle Hoffman, the founder and chief executive of Choices Women’s Medical Center, adopted a 3-year-old girl from Russia when she was 58 years old. She tells The New York Times that many of her friends greeted the news with shock and rage. Some made remarks like, “What are you, nuts?”

Despite the reactions of her friends and family, Hoffman remained steadfast in her decision to become a parent. Hoffman remembers, “I had experienced many facets of love: sexual, devotional, parental from myself to my mother, the love of a cause. But I had never experienced what so many people experience as being the ultimate non-conditional love. I wanted to experience what it was to love like that.”

As another example, New York Mag says Ann Maloney was 52 when she had her first child. When asked why she waited so long, Maloney told the magazine that she had “deferred motherhood for the typical reasons: an unhappy first marriage and a late career switch … that required years of school and training and a radical relocation from suburban Texas to New York City.” However, when she was finally ready to be a mother at 48, she had neared the age cutoff set by fertilization clinics. Her parenting dreams didn’t become a reality until Columbia University agreed to help the couple.

READ MORE: The Struggles of Being an Older Mother

After doctors were able to bring her out of menopause with hormones and transfer donor embryos to her uterus, Maloney gave birth to her first daughter, Lily. Maloney, who is now over 60 years old, lives at home with her husband, Ross, and their young children. But despite the large age gap, Ross reassures New York Mag, “You don’t know how high-energy, actually, both of us are … We are both very intense and also nurturers.”

While having children at an older age is not the “traditional” route, older parents have experiences that younger parents may not. They are typically more emotionally mature, more intellectually prepared and more financially secure.

Lois Nachamie, a psychotherapist and counselor tells US News, “By the time you’ve reached your mid-30s, early 40s, you’ve sown any wild oats that you might sow.” According to her, becoming an older mother is a “volitional choice, and that choice informs, I believe, the entire experience.” Because they’ve already had time to mature, older parents can be more involved in their children’s development.

And because older parents have experienced so many difficulties on the path to parenthood, they are often more invested in their child’s growth. Robin Gorman Newman, founder of the Motherhood Later website, tells Parenting, “Older parents are some of the most grateful people I know. From fertility issues to health risks, chances are their road to parenthood wasn’t easy.”

Edited by Ellena Kilgallon
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