Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how age-dissimilar couples who are or seek to become parents interpret inequalities in the meanings and realities of older/younger motherhood and fatherhood. Based on interviews in Australia, it explores how gender inequalities unevenly impact actual or potential parents.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates those in age-dissimilar relationships—older-man and older-woman couplings with large age differences—who are or seek to become parents together. I ask how these couples interpret inequalities in the meanings and realities of older/younger parenthood. Past research on age and parenthood shows that, in Euro-American contexts, older parenthood is more common in wealthier, urban areas. It is also thought to be medically and socially risky for mothers rather than fathers. Risks are understood to extend from conception, pregnancy, birth, and into parent-child caring relations. For instance, caring relations between older women and their children are imagined to be problematic, and mothers are framed as ‘too old’ to care for their children or as soon requiring care themselves.

Based on in-depth interviews with heterosexual, age-dissimilar couples in Australia that explored shared understandings of these unions, I examine how gender and class inequalities unevenly impact actual or potential parents. Older women in relationships with younger men worried that they would have difficulty conceiving or risk the health of their child or children. Older men with younger women were meanwhile concerned that they would be unable to financially provide for their young children following retirement. Both younger men and women spoke of delaying parenthood for financial reasons. In this paper, I analyse inequalities in and between couples’ experiences and the meanings they attribute to them. I ask how widespread attitudes to couples’ age differences interact with anxieties about ageing in parenthood, and influence their wellbeing in and beyond their unions.