TY  - JOUR
A1  - Myrskylä, M
A1  - Barclay, K
A1  - Goisis, A
Y1  - 2017/10//
IS  - 10
EP  - 772
JF  - Gynakologe
AV  - public
ID  - discovery10068361
N1  - This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
SN  - 1433-0393
VL  - 50
N2  - Background
In high-income countries childbearing has been increasingly postponed since the 1970s and it is crucial to understand the consequences of this demographic shift. The literature has tended to characterize later motherhood as a significant health threat for children and parents.

Objectives
We contribute to this debate by reviewing recent evidence suggesting that an older maternal age can also have positive effects.

Materials
Literature linking the age at parenthood with the sociodemographic characteristics of the parents, with macrolevel interactions, and with subjective well-being.

Methods
Comprehensive review of the existing literature.

Results
Recent studies show that there can also be advantages associated with later motherhood. First, whilst in past older mothers had low levels of education and large families, currently older mothers tend to have higher education and smaller families than their younger peers. Consequently, children born to older mothers in the past tended to have worse outcomes than children born to younger mothers, whilst the opposite is true in recent cohorts. Second, postponement of childbearing means that the child is born at a later date and in a later birth cohort, and may benefit from secular changes in the macroenvironment. Evidence shows that when the positive trends in the macroenvironment are strong they overweigh the negative effects of reproductive ageing. Third, existing studies show that happiness increases around and after childbirth among older mothers, whereas for younger mothers the effect does not exist or is short-lived.

Conclusion
There are important sociodemographic pathways associated with postponement of childbearing which might compensate or even more than compensate for the biological disadvantages associated with reproductive ageing.
KW  - Pregnancy
KW  -  Maternal age
KW  -  Maternal health
KW  -  Socioeconomic status
KW  -  Well-being
TI  - Advantages of later motherhood
SP  - 767
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00129-017-4124-1
ER  -