A mother lifting a child into the air, with the sun setting over the ocean in the background. “Silhouette Photo of a Mother Carrying Her Baby at Beach during Golden Hour” by Pixabay under Pexels license.

As an academic, I often find myself traveling internationally. During one such weary wait at a busy, ‘award-winning’ airport, I wrestled with boredom by watching a mum trying to help settle her cranky child with an assortment of books and crayons. Nothing worked. Finally, the child settled with a tablet and a shrill-voiced, cheer-manufacturing character. The mother appeared to be in her fifties, the child no older than preschool age. Had my socially irreverent, politically incorrect mother been with me, she would no doubt have commented on the maternal age and launched into a familiar tirade about the ‘challenges’ of ‘late’ motherhood. Yet, as we all know, the tantrums of preschool years are rarely quelled by youthfulness—or by reason.

Globally, women are increasingly postponing marriage and childbirth. For example, recent data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) comprising of all birth records (2016-2023) in the United States show that not only has the average maternal age risen across all racial and ethnic groups, it is particularly striking for first births among ‘older’ mothers. Specifically, for mothers ages 30-34, the percentage of first births has increased from 22% to 25% while for mothers age 35 and older it has risen from 10% to 13%.

Demographers attribute this shift in life-course aspirations to rising levels of women’s education, greater economic independence, wider access to contraception, and evolving social norms surrounding marriage and motherhood. The Washington, D.C.–based Population Reference Bureau, for instance, highlights how these changes generate a “virtuous cycle” in poorer nations: improvements in mothers’ education enhance reproductive health outcomes, which in turn foster gains in girls’ education.

While the connection between education and empowerment continues to underpin development imaginaries in the Global South, in industrialized Western contexts, postponement of marriage and childbearing is more often articulated through the language of individual agency and liberal political ideology. Curiously, irrespective of the wealth of the nation or maternal age, the social project of motherhood continues to be entangled in cultural and moral judgments about what is considered good, desirable and appropriate.

The Anatomy of Midlife

How do women in wealthy societies with high levels of educational attainment navigate the social expectations of motherhood when it occurs in midlife? In one of my recent research projects, I interviewed professional women in Germany who pursued assisted reproductive interventions in their 40s as part of their family-building journeys. Most reported giving birth in their early to mid-40s, often financing treatments out of pocket (around € 5000) in private healthcare facilities. Given that Germany records a mean age at first birth higher than the EU average (approximately 32 years, according to Statistisches Bundesamt), it is perhaps unsurprising that the women I spoke with—many of them senior academics at German universities—framed their decision to have children later in life in terms of deliberate “motivations.”

These “motivations” revolved around fulfilling professional aspirations that ensured financial stability, fostered personal independence, and cultivated a sense of preparedness for more mature parenting. Yet, because women’s bodies are continually surveilled through the lens of a fixed “biological clock,” late motherhood is often cast as risky, deviant, or miraculous—what is sometimes termed the “last-chance baby”, the women I spoke with felt an unwitting obligation to explain their decisions. This could be because their encounters with the biomedical world were inundated with memories of scans, graphs, probabilities and statistics, reminding them of their ‘advanced’ age, depleting egg reserves and overall, a timing that was either off or a ‘window’ that was closing on them.

Undoubtedly, midlife is messy, confusing and an ill-founded topic.  Feminist writer Margaret Gullette—author of prize-winning monographs such as Aged by Culture and Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel—describes midlife as a pervasive cultural fiction and ‘middle-ageism’, as a socially constructed disease of the 20th century: an ambiguous life stage marked simultaneously by promise and decline. My interlocutors spoke about how they navigated this cultural tension in their everyday lives as new mothers. While they could, to some extent, “mitigate” moral judgments about the “lateness” of their motherhood by participating in bourgeois rituals of contemporary parenting—birthday parties, playdates, and the like—the expectations placed on them were often heightened. Because they had made the “radical” choice to postpone childbirth in favor of professional success, was it not assumed that they should now raise exceptionally capable or “smarter” children?

Whither Midlife Crisis

To be sure, we have come a long way in challenging the cultural pathology of the dreaded “midlife crisis”—a trope once synonymous with growing pains, waning sexuality, receding hairlines, and declining estrogen. Today, midlife, especially the years leading into and beyond retirement, increasingly overlaps with the gerontological imaginary of the Third Age—a life stage framed by continuing productivity, vitality, independence, and a sense of agelessness. Within this context, mothering at midlife can be interpreted as a sign of success and resourcefulness.

Sociological studies (here and here) on older motherhood reveal how professionally accomplished women often frame their transition into this phase as one of maturity and preparedness. In doing so, however, they inadvertently reinforce a moral hierarchy of “good” and “responsible” mothering, distinguishing themselves from younger and professionally inexperienced mothers. In fact, this regulatory idea of mature parenting has been conceptualized as ‘ageing capital’ by Lahad and Hvidtfeldt (2019) in their textual analysis of midlife motherhood in Denmark and Israel. While this ideology may have been shaped by a combination of political, cultural, and demographic factors—such as Denmark’s social welfare state or Israel’s Zionist eugenic discourse—it was middle-aged women who were entrusted with the role of moral agents and good mothers in both contexts.

It is perhaps of no surprise that for my interlocutors, the validation of their “late” reproductive timing as a moral good produced an intriguing social paradox: on the one hand, it liberated them to pursue parenthood through reproductive technologies and biomedicine; on the other hand, it disciplined them into framing biological mothering as a compulsory rite of passage for realizing the ideal of womanhood.

Indeed, this study revealed that circulating ideologies of “responsible parenting” are disproportionately borne by middle-aged mothers who are caught in the neoliberal fever dream of performance, personal productivity, and optimal childrearing. The celebratory fiction of midlife as emancipatory or empowering is, in this sense, rarely rewarding for women in cultures that continue to value them primarily for their professional productivity and/or reproductive capacities. When the life course is measured through the arithmetic of milestones, gains and losses, challenges and opportunities (apologies to psychologists), women’s lives—as mothers, carers, providers, and whole persons—remain governed by the impossible ethic of everything, everywhere, all at once.

Additional Readings

Tannistha Samanta is Associate Professor of Sociology at FLAME University, Pune, India. This work was supported by a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study/College for Social Sciences and Humanities, University Alliance Ruhr, Germany.