Oh yeah. I definitely think I want kids at some point.” I was breezily told this by a guy I was on a sort-of date with – a notable statement considering the man was 44 years old and single.
I had been noticing this phenomenon, or something like it, cropping up more and more frequently recently: unattached men blithely expressing their confident expectation that they would, at some vague, undefined point in the future, realise their paternal destiny – despite apparently taking no action to achieve this goal, such as dating with intention, committing to a relationship or creating the sort of life that would be conducive to starting a family. Even better, sometimes they shared the sentiment that they were “still thinking about it”, having come to no firm conclusions on the matter upon entering middle age.
It’s not just anecdotal. The average age of fathers is going up around the world, including England and Wales, where it has increased to 33.7 years old. There has been a postponement of parenthood in general: the average age of first-time mothers has risen to 29 in the UK (more than half of women now remain childless by the age of 30 for the first time since records began), while the birthrate decline in nearly every country on Earth has been well documented.
Millennials have been dubbed the “Peter Pan generation” due to our delaying of big life milestones such as getting married and getting sprogged up; concurrently, the propensity to cling onto culture aimed at children has resulted in the cursed phenomenon of the “Disney adult”. At a time when previous generations would have been embarking on a mid-life crisis, complete with sportscar, leather jacket and abandoning the wife and kids for their 26-year-old secretary, many of the current cohort are still stuck in first gear, mulling over the baby question as if they had all the time in the world.
And, on the one hand, men do. Quick biology lesson: unlike women, who are born with all the eggs they’re ever going to have and release just one a month between puberty and menopause when reproduction shuts up shop, most men create millions upon millions of new sperm throughout their lifetime. Hence why you can see the likes of Robert De Niro casually cracking out another baby at 79.
On the other hand, just because it’s possible, doesn’t mean it’s probable. Counter to what culture would have us believe, males very much have their own fertility window. One 2020 study found that conception is 30 per cent less likely for men over 40 than it is for men under 30.
Those like De Niro are “an exception, rather than the rule”, says Dr Michael Carroll, a reader in reproductive science at Manchester Metropolitan University and author of Clinical Reproductive Science. “It’s not a full stop – there’s not a definitive cessation of reproduction – but past the age of about 40, the quality of sperm starts to decline. Motility, the capacity to swim really well, declines; morphology, what they look like in terms of shape, becomes not great; and the number of sperm produced declines as well.”
It’s not just that the likelihood of conception goes down with paternal age; the likelihood that any baby conceived will have certain health issues also goes up. “Over the years, those spermatogonia will start to pick up errors in mutations,” explains Carroll. “Those mutations can be carried through to the mature sperm, then through to the offspring. So older men have a higher propensity of producing children that have neuropsychiatric disorders or neurodevelopmental disorders.” A large 2014 study based on Swedish medical records suggested that children born to fathers older than 45 were about 75 per cent more likely than those born to fathers in their early twenties to have autism, for example.
Yet, currently, there seems to be a conspicuous education gap. Men “don’t know much” about their reproductive capabilities, argues Carroll. “In fact, I don’t think men really think about reproduction at all until they’re in a relationship where there’s a decision to start a family – and by that time, if they’re in their late thirties or early forties, the quality of sperm has already decreased, and so their time to pregnancy will have likely increased.”
The vast majority of the research and conversation around infertility has historically focused on women, causing it to be seen by society as a “women’s issue”. In reality, it’s completely equal – 50 per cent of fertility problems within a heterosexual couple will derive from the man.
This misconception might be no accident, though, posits Dr Robin Hadley, an associate lecturer who specialises in male involuntary and circumstantial childlessness. “Societies have a social clock, an ideal period of when to reproduce,” he says. “Within that, men were always assumed to be fully fertile from puberty till death. What’s the benefit to society to maintain that myth? It keeps the focus on women and women’s bodies, and it’s about control.”
Past the age of about 40, the quality of sperm starts to decline
Dr Michael Carroll
Data is often not even collected on men’s fecundity in the same way it is for women, such as during birth registrations and questionnaires for large health data sets like the UK Biobank. Hadley cites a political scientist in America called Cynthia R Daniels: “She said it’s because societies will usually go to war at some point, and they don’t want to give a psychological advantage to any enemy that their men are weak,” he says. “Societies don’t want to see their men as vulnerable in any way.”
And yet men are vulnerable when it comes to reproduction. There’s a growing body of evidence indicating that men’s sperm is reducing in quality and quantity. In 2017, a study demonstrated that total sperm counts had declined by 59 per cent in high-income countries since 1973. The same study, repeated in 2023, found that sperm counts are reducing at a rate of around 2 per cent per year.
Other research has shown a possible dip in overall motility. “That’s probably a more important factor when you’re looking at fertility, because sperm need to swim quite an arduous journey to reach an egg,” says Carroll. “It’s the equivalent of swimming seven miles through treacle.” Add in a documented decrease in testosterone levels in men, and it’s clear that fertility, or lack thereof, “is not just a female problem, it’s a male and female problem.”
Despite often being seen as the ones to drag their heels on the baby-making decision, the irony is that it’s childless men, not women, who are more likely to say they dream of being parents. Some 57 per cent of men said they want to have children someday, compared to 45 per cent of women, according to a poll by Pew Research Centre.
In which case, why aren’t they more proactive about the decision? The nebulous term “some day” could be at the crux of the matter – the visualisation of becoming a father as some ambiguous, indeterminate event, happening to some hazy future version of oneself. It’s an issue known as “identity discontinuation”, according to Sekoul Krastev, managing director of The Decision Lab, a consultancy that applies behavioural science to real-world decision-making.
“There has been interesting research to show that men are more disconnected from their future selves than women for various reasons,” he says. “It can have this consequence of making them more likely to think of decisions as being removed from them, not something that they have to face; something that they can postpone and not really have to think about.”
And indeed, fertility decisions often end up falling to women. Research into family planning shows that “It’s mainly the women in heterosexual couples who are taking charge of the fertility question,” according to Dr Vincent Straub, a population researcher at the University of Oxford whose work focuses on men’s health and reproductive genetics. “There’s still this implicit bias that reproduction is a female topic, and it’s not something where the man should be leading the conversation. There’s a lack of engagement from men.”
Biology, too, plays a part – that lack of a perceived fertility cut-off for men could unconsciously lead to procrastination. “A man and a woman reaching the same age and thinking about kids are thinking about it very differently,” says Krastev. “For women, it’s something of an off-ramp. It’s a decision of: ‘Will I have one now or never?’, as opposed to ‘Now or later?’”
There’s still this implicit bias that reproduction is a female topic, and it’s not something where the man should be leading the conversation
Dr Vincent Straub, University of Oxford
There’s some evidence to show that a lack of a hard deadline can result in vacillation and indecision. “Usually, people will take the time that they’re allotted to make a decision or do a task,” says Krastev. “But if you give someone too much time, it could actually lead to a bad decision.”
He cites the “secretary problem”, a mathematical problem set in the 1950s: someone is trying to hire a new employee but has to immediately decide after each interview whether or not to hire the candidate or reject them and move on to the next. “You don’t have a timeline of when to stop looking for that person, so you can just keep interviewing people forever – because you’re not sure if the next person will be the best person that you’ve ever met,” says Krastev.
This quandary could perhaps be best observed in the precursor to the decision to have children: the decision of who to have children with. “Everyone tells you this is the most important decision you’ll ever make, so obviously you don’t want to get it wrong – you want to optimise the decision,” adds Krastev. “So even someone who’s very well intentioned and wants to have kids at an early age might think, ‘Well, is this really the right time? The right person? Could I do better?’” The rise of dating apps and subsequent idea that “the one” could always be another swipe away has only exacerbated things further.
It all makes for the perfect breeding ground for decision paralysis – when we feel unable to make a choice due to overwhelm, overthinking or fear that we’re going to choose wrong. It usually happens when there’s an unlimited amount of time, an unlimited or high number of options, and other types of uncertainty are introduced. “And with having kids, obviously that’s quite a lot of uncertainty,” says Krastev.
The take-home from the experts is that the culture around family planning has to change – men need to be properly educated and empowered to be a proactive part of the decision-making process. Straub highlights a current three-way gender gap – education, research and policy – that needs addressing. “The average man’s comparative lack of fertility education is baked in, to a large extent, even in the research infrastructure,” says Straub. “The lack of research or evidence on this topic is already a demonstration that we don’t even know the level of education of men when it comes to their reproductive health.”
There’s also emerging research that explores how parental policies shape who takes ownership of procreation decisions. If there’s an imbalance to begin with, such as maternity versus paternity leave (the latter is only two weeks in the UK), it reinforces the expectation that fertility decisions are driven by women – because they’ll inevitably be the ones making a trade-off between career and childcare responsibilities. “The expectation is that, for the man, that trade-off doesn’t even exist,” says Straub.
But there are reasons to be hopeful. In November 2024, a new National Men’s Health Strategy was announced by the UK health secretary, which includes plans to improve men’s health literacy, education and training. A new research organisation dedicated to understanding and addressing issues affecting men and boys in the UK, the Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys, was also launched this year.
“There is now a shift, and these kinds of conversations will hopefully start, not just in research settings, but also in classrooms,” says Straub. “But the gap definitely, definitely still exists.”
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