Fathers are getting (much) older ― and it is not just celebrities like Mick Jagger and Al Pacino. Andrew Billen, 65, who has two young daughters, weighs up the joys and challenges of having children later in life.
When my first daughter was born 16 years ago, I was 49. I felt fully qualified to be referred to as an older father. Now I am not so sure. This June Al Pacino, who is 83, had a baby boy with his 29-year-old girlfriend (they have reached a custody agreement since then). The month before, his fellow movie mafioso, Robert De Niro, now 80, announced he and his partner had produced a daughter. In the UK, three years ago Bernie Ecclestone, former Formula 1 boss and sprightly tax fraudster, welcomed a child at the age of 89. Other celebrity members of the 70-plus dads’ club include Richard Gere and Mick Jagger, while Ronnie Wood had twins at 69, and when Billy Joel’s wife gives birth this month he will be 74.
And me? Looking back on it, I was practically a child.
We live in a time of what statisticians call “postponement transition” where, thanks to further education, slower-burning careers and steep house prices, the average age for a first-time mother in the UK is now 29.1 years, up 1.4 years in the decade between 2010 and 2020 and, according to the Office for National Statistics, fathers have followed suit. On the right-hand end of these demographic graphs are distributed the growing numbers of late starters and second-time-arounders. Since the Seventies, the number of dads in the US aged between 45 and 49 has increased by more than 50 per cent.
This is despite growing evidence that while until recently a woman giving birth over the age of 35 was medically referred to as a “geriatric mother” because of the increased risks she brought to the partus, old fathers are also risk factors. Research says we may bequeath children increased chances of leukaemia, autism (six times more likely), schizophrenia (four to five times), bipolar disorder and epilepsy, as well as contribute to a higher risk of miscarriage and premature birth.
We old-timers can still knock it out, but our sperm isn’t what it used to be. So why do we do it? I always wanted children, but not until my late forties did I meet Miss Right (I was for too long Mr Wrong). This absence in my life was filled by a busy life as an ambitious journalist. I was not overly worried. My mother’s father, a senior Scottish civil servant, was 40 when he had her, his first child, and my father, whose twenties had been interrupted by wartime service in Bomber Command, was 41 when I came along (after his death I found his pocket diary ― the entry for December 30, 1957 noted “10am, meeting”). He didn’t seem so old. We didn’t play football together, but neither of us was interested in sport. No rush, I thought.
But in my forties I felt sad. When Lucy, my girlfriend of, oh, eight months, returned from the loo with the news that two, obviously out-of-date and highly unreliable, pregnancy tests were positive, I leapt about chanting, “I’m going to be a daddy!” She was a mere 37 and had only recently moved in with me. Her joy seemed more confined. The next summer I looked down at Abby, shivering under a lamp in her hospital maternity cot, and told her we were going to have such fun together, and so we have ― even more when her sister, Orla, arrived two and a half years later. A GP commented that I was a lucky man. Didn’t I know it? And I still know it now that I am 65 and the girls are 16 and 13 (lovely but lousy at going to bed and getting up).
But here are Pacino and De Niro talking to the press about the latest products of their loins. Pacino: “It feels like it always did, you know… It’s very special. Yeah, I guess.” De Niro: “It doesn’t get easier. It is what it is. It’s OK.” If those are not expressions of buyer’s regret, then I have never been in Marks & Spencer on December 27. They certainly do not sound like the four older (but not that old) fathers with whom I have been comparing notes. There must be some who wonder whether their vast spending on children’s footwear might not have instead funded a luxuriously appointed midlife crisis ― and I look forward to hearing from them. My guess, however, is that there are tens of thousands more like Rod, Greg, Ken and Charles.
I’ll start with Rod. Rod Evison is the Dad Whose Fatherhood Completed Him. Twice. He had three children in his fifties: Luisi is 20 and in college, Erick, 18, has just joined the army and Mimi is 13. Then, four years ago, after a divorce in which Evison was awarded custody of the children, he had a boy, Lucas, with his second wife, Renata. Next month Rod is 71.
“I’d say it’s really been the making of me as a person,” says Evison, who worked in international development finance. “Children make a dramatic change to your life, not immediately overnight but over time as you begin to realise, gosh, what a gift this is. It has made me, I think, a much better person, a more rounded person, a more tolerant, forgiving, patient person, and more empathetic than I was certainly in my forties.”
When his first marriage did not work out, he faced huge legal bills from the divorce and moved with the three children from London to Sussex. It was a period of crisis. His brother was diagnosed with cancer and in a year both he and their elderly mother were dead. “I thought, well, the children are growing up ― what do I want my old age to look like? I didn’t really fancy what I was necessarily seeing that much. And then ― extraordinarily, just completely by chance ― I met this Brazilian woman who was over here on holiday and we continued to correspond after she went back to Brazil. She was in her mid-thirties and she clearly wanted to have a child and, to cut a long story short, we decided to take a risk and get hitched and see what we could make of it.”
And what did his existing brood make of Lucas? “The idea of another little baby coming into the house was met, particularly by the girls, with unbridled joy. They’ve been absolutely fantastic about it. Erick, my son, I mean, he’s fine too, but boys react in a different way.”
I thought, well, the children are growing up ― what do I want my old age to look like?
With his work now down to a day a week, Evison’s only real concerns seem to be about paying for this new, late life of his. He has remortgaged the house, sold a second home in Cyprus and has discussed downsizing within the next eight years with Renata. The fees for the children’s day schools are not fully funded. His health is good but “you can’t escape the grim reaper”.
Death creeps up on us and when it doesn’t it springs. My father was 14 years older than my mother and she always worried about the inadequacy of what she assumed would be her widow’s pension. Then, in 1985, she died aged 55 and Dad lived for another 28 years, to 97. Yet an older parent’s presumed proximity to death can hang heavily over a family.
I once interviewed the author Rebecca Miller, whose father, Arthur Miller, was 46 when she was born. We exchanged childhood fears. “I was,” she said, “convinced he was going to die when I was really young and that was very frightening to me. He seemed old to me. I would see other people’s fathers and they seemed so much younger.”
The sensible way to alleviate the gloom is for an older dad to keep fit. He would do well, however, to compete with 69-year-old Greg Coleman, a successful media and adverting executive with two children under ten. Still not quite retired, he lectures and chairs the advisory board of the leading AI ad company LoopMe. He visits a gym twice a week and swims between 45 and 60 minutes every morning. “I’m trying to take care of my body as much as I possibly can for them,” he says. When his girls are in their late twenties he will be 90, he points out. I love American optimism.
Coleman is our Getting It Right Second Time Around Father. Perhaps the most impressive thing to say about him is that when we arrange the interview by text for the next morning, he is at home in Palm Beach and just back from Halloween trick-or-treating with Audrey, nine, and Eloise, seven. The next day he talks to me from Brooklyn.
“I ran to the airport and took the two-and-a-half-hour flight to New York. And I’m on a five o’clock flight going back. So I’ll be there to tuck them in tonight,” he says. “It is about making choices. In the olden days I would have stayed here for a couple of days but this way, they won’t miss me. I was with them last night and they’ll see me at bedtime today. It’s not a hard thing for me to do. Now if I could have just been that smart 30 years ago…”
Today the family eat dinner together at 5.30pm and then go to the beach. Thirty years ago his family life was different. During the childhoods of his sons, Stephen and Ben, and daughter, Melissa, by his first marriage, he had left for Manhattan from Long Island before they were up and would often return after they had gone to bed.
“I didn’t need to go to all those dinners, but that wasn’t so clear then. In my late twenties and early thirties, when I was having the kids, I had the goals of creating a personal brand, of having enough financial resources to take care of everybody for a long time. But part of it was also selfish, if I’m really honest.”
After his first marriage ended he met Jill, who did not seem to want to have children but four years into their marriage quite suddenly changed her mind. Audrey arrived when he was 60. “It has rejuvenated me and it’s been the greatest blessing that I could imagine. I didn’t have the children to keep me young, but man, does it ever.”
Sometimes people say it is nice to see him spending time with his grandchildren. “I’ll smile and say, ‘You know what? I do have a grandchild, but these are mine.’ And they’re like, ‘Wow!’” He hopes I hear the happiness in his voice.
How far Evison and Coleman seem from the old stereotype of forbidding, distant older fathers. The odious Victorian patriarch is mainly a myth, but that didn’t stop fathers from using it as blueprint. Marista Leishman, the daughter of the first director general of the BBC, John Reith, wrote of him suffering his children in his study once a day and speaking sparsely to them over dinner. He demanded that Marista play the piano to guests. “The keyboard would freeze under my fingers,” she remembered.
I didn’t have the children to keep me young, but man, does it ever.
Young children can have their doubts about even a benevolent older father. Brian Cox, aka Succession’s Logan Roy, told me in 2007, when he was 60, about the two young boys from his second marriage. “I think I’m a bit scary for them, because I’m this big, white-haired figure,” he said. I was glad when we spoke again last year that normal teen relations had been established. “They sleep during the day and then at night-time they go crazy on their devices, gaming and all that. And I’m having to deal with all that.”
No child, surely, could be scared of my third older father, a man whose calm, kind voice promises that all things shall be well. He is our Ken Bruce Dad. In fact, he is Ken Bruce, late of Radio 2 and now proving ratings catnip at Greatest Hits Radio. At 72, he is also the oldest father I talk to, the one who married most often, with the most children, and the only one for whom late parenthood brought the special challenges of a disabled child.
Murray, now 21, is the eldest child from Bruce’s third marriage and was diagnosed as autistic just before his third birthday after he stopped speaking. Today he uses letter charts and word processors to communicate and attends college. Bruce says he has been a “joy” to bring up and points out that all children bring their individual challenges. Murray was followed by Verity and then Charlie, born when Bruce was almost 57. When we talk he has just returned from driving Charlie back from his school three miles from their home in Oxfordshire.
After two divorces, and with two sons by his first wife and a daughter by his second, he says he assumed he was “done” with having children. Then he met and married Kerith, a radio researcher. “I was just about 50 and I thought I have got time for one more, and we had three as it turned out.”
In his 2009 autobiography, he wrote that he had finally achieved a state of mind where his career was the servant of his family and not the other way around. “And I still feel the same today,” he says. “If I asked my wife now, she’d say I’m still born to be on the radio. She knows that if I stopped doing that it would be a big part of my life missing. But the difference is that I have never taken on stuff that would take me away for too long from the family or that took up too much of my time, the social side of business. I’ve sort of pretty much completely given up on the need to lunch, the need to network.”
At the gates of the primary school he says he was fortunate not to stand out because of the number of granddads picking up children. “But I never felt decrepit. Even at the school sports day I was able to run a few yards.
“One thing that does slightly concern me is that I won’t be around for them. I mean, I seem to have survived so far to the teenage years, but I would like to be around for a little while more and see them into young adulthood. But just having youngsters around is a rejuvenating experience. You do run around a bit more, you do go up and down the stairs quite a lot, so you keep fit for one thing, but also, you know, the age that, say, Charlie is now, there are so many jokes and laughs. Being around a teenager with a sense of humour is actually what keeps me young.”
He agrees when I say intergenerational communication has improved. “My wife and I find ourselves constantly saying, ‘I wouldn’t have spoken to my parents like that.’ They treat us more as equals and occasionally you have to lay down the law, but mostly we speak as equals.”
It is a paradox that as life spans increase, the cultural chasms between youth and age have either narrowed or been bridged. Without any disrespect to Greater Hits Radio, whose playlist provides a place of safety for many older dads, I am grateful to my teenagers for playing me Harry Styles’s As It Was, Taylor Swift’s I Knew You Were Trouble (and for the inside track that it was about Styles) and Olivia Rodrigo’s Vampire. And in the age of the remake, the connections between what we enjoyed as children and what our children enjoy are obvious. I would have liked ITV’s 2015 Thunderbirds revival in any case, but I liked it even more because my girls were watching it with me at exactly the ages my brother and I were when we watched the original series 50 years before.
A lot of my friends say, ‘Are you crazy, going through all this again? You must be exhausted.’
Older fatherhood is a great excuse for self-infantilisation. Five years after his death at the age of 89, Saul Bellow’s widow, Janis Freedman, the great American novelist’s fifth wife, spoke of how in his final illness he had repeatedly watched The Lion King with his five-year-old daughter, Rosie. It is a bizarre image but it carries with it shades of guilt and atonement for his treatment of his earlier children, abandoned amid the confusion of his infidelities (for not all marriages fail because the absentee dad is away simply earning money). Freedman told her interviewer, “He failed his children, he left them, and it was a wound he carried around. He knew the cruelty of this.”
My final interviewee is another writer, Charles Cumming, the prolific author of espionage thrillers (his latest, Kennedy 35, was published last month). With two children by his second wife, the art historian Harriette Peel, he is our Biological Determinist Dad or, to view it another way, our Romantic Dad. When I ask him why, post-divorce and at the age of 50, a father of teenagers would decide to have more children, his answer is startlingly obvious: “We fell in love. I was really looking forward to living with her and making a family with her.” Their son, Cassius, is two and a half. Hamish was born four months ago.
“A lot of my friends say, ‘Are you crazy, going through all this again? You must be exhausted.’ But I’m not and it doesn’t feel crazy at all. It feels like the best thing a person can do with their time, really, having children. That’s my general view of it. Children are a delivery system for joy.”
Cumming married first aged 28 and in his thirties had two children, Stanley, now 19, and Iris, 16. While they were still in nappies he was working at his novels, trying to build a career that required sufficient sleep and a head clear enough to write. What was more, his books required research to be conducted abroad. For the three novels he wrote when his children were very young, he travelled to China, Tunisia, Berlin and Austria.
“Their mother was carrying the greater burden of the children’s lives for sure,” he says. “I felt guilty about not helping as much as I could or should have done. I was still helping a lot but just not doing as much as her. It was definitely a choice to concentrate as much as possible on making the books a success, to the detriment of the amount of childcare I was able to do.”
His relationship with Stanley and Iris more than survived. He now lives in a four-bedroom house in west London that can accommodate both teenagers when they visit. An “added dimension of joy”, he says, is that they adore their half-brothers. “They make the fish fingers, and then they go home and the parents clear up and do the bath. Which is as it should be.”
Cumming, who is a realist as well as a romantic, makes an important practical point. When we are older, if we are lucky, we are better off than when we are starting out. “What Mr Pacino and Mr De Niro have, and I’m sure Mick Jagger too, is staff and an army of nannies. My wife and I have been lucky to have a maternity nurse helping us through the crucial first weeks of the boys’ births. It means that they sleep and it means we sleep, and everybody’s getting enough rest.”
It also allows him to carry on researching abroad. He talks to me from Athens, but he is on the plane home the next day. Such trips are shorter, he says. Money, if you have it, compensates for the one great argument against becoming an older parent: that you are likely to be grandparent-poor and deprive your children of one of the purest forms of love. The trick is to bus in your first cohort of children, if they exist, and don’t hate you.
But what’s it like for the kids? A review of the rather scant evidence available, conducted by Joanna Lysons and Vasanti Jadva and published this year in the Human Reproduction journal, is not encouraging. One study found a five-year increase in paternal age related to a 12 per cent increase in behavioural problems by the time the children were seven, although much more recent studies have shown no evidence of a paternal age effect on internalised problems such as anxiety and depression. Limited evidence points to an association with poorer child cognitive ability. I prefer a 2017 study that suggested older fathers were more likely to have “geekier” sons. Professor Allan Pacey from Sheffield University commented, “Given our recent trend to have our children later in life, perhaps we are destined for a future society of geniuses.”
Perhaps. A lesser achievement of my geriatric parenting is that neither of my two daughters has yet called me an old fart. The one time I pondered aloud giving up work, Orla replied dismissively, “Retire? Daddy can’t even do holiday,” and Abby implored me not to “because it would be so embarrassing”. Obviously I told her being embarrassing is in a father’s job description.
Sixteen years ago, when she was on the way and I was turning 50, Brian Cox told me, “Shaw said youth is wasted on the young. It is the same with fatherhood. All fathers should be between 40 and 60.” I still like that, but it’s nonsense. While such a restriction would preclude Pacino and De Niro from further procreation, it would stop Evison and Coleman and Bruce from doing something they seem rather good at and discourage Cumming. And I think the kids would mind.
Written by: Andrew Billen
© The Times of London