Having a baby at 62 -
Isle of Thanet Gazette 14th July 2006
It's been a bumper week for the tabloids. Startling displays of violence on the football pitch; footballers wives giving out the message that attractive equals emaciated; five years in prison for paedophilia declared "not unduly lenient" by the Attorney General and an older mother photographed cuddling her new-born son. And who has met with the deepest disapproval? Where has the harshest criticism been heaped? It has all been said already so I have only one thing to add to the stream of vitriol that has been directed at 62-year old Patricia Farrant who gave birth last week, and that is: give the poor woman a break. No, it is not ideal to be eighty when your child is eighteen, getting up in the night is exhausting enough when you are decades younger and seventy-year olds can't play football with little boys in the same way a twenty-five year old can. But there are worse things for a child. Mrs Farrant has brought up four children already and is a child psychiatrist. She and her husband appear to be comfortably off; she has put younger guardians in place, should anything happen to her. "What is important in parenting," Dr Farrant says, "is not how old you are, but whether you are meeting all the child's needs and we are very confident about doing that." Few families are perfect - hers sounds as good as most and a whole lot better than many. I know a little about this. My husband Tim was 55 when our son Tom was born. We discussed the implications. What would happen, Tim asked me, when Tom was ten and his father met him from school looking like his Grandad? It was a valid concern. But, as I replied, by then having a father there at all might be a novelty." A quarter of all children in Britain live with only one parent; one in six fathers are permanently apart from their offspring. Two loving parents, even wrinkled ones, have to be better than no parents at all. Columnist Melanie Philips wrote in the Daily Mail this week that there could be few who viewed the pictures of mother and child "without feeling intensely queasy". Well I did. It's an unusual sight certainly but not a sickening one. It will no doubt be difficult at times and the child may well be orphaned young. But parents of all ages die and many children tragically are. (And if they are then brought up by their grandparents does anyone suggest they'd be better off with youthful strangers?) What takes my breath away is how judgemental people are when so few of us have the right to be complacent about our own parenting. A million children in this country have some sort of mental health issue and the number is rising. At a time when we also have the highest rate of family breakdown and teenage pregnancy in Europe, when kids as young as six won't eat properly in case they get fat, children of eleven are on heroin and whole websites exist just for young people to encourage each other to kill themselves, I can't help thinking that when it comes to judging the horrors of what a parent can do to a child, simply being old when he's born isn't even on the scale.