Aging Male Infertility

"We want to see fertility taught as part of the curriculum and have been successful in getting it included."
"Young men need to know they won't necessarily remain fertile their whole life, and are more likely to have problems as they age."
Professor Adam Balen, Fertility Education initiative, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust 

"Online dating makes me nostalgic for the meat-market discos of my  youth. At least then you could eye each other up straight away and let hormones do the rest."
"I have been on so many dates with men who take to the hills when I said I wanted a serious relationship."
"It's such a waste of time and effort when my biological clock is ticking like a time-bomb."
Unnamed

A new study has revealed that the age of a man when he has a baby may have an effect on his child's social development later in life.

In 2013 the average age of men becoming new fathers was 32.9 as compared to the present where the average age is now 33.3. Ten percent of new fathers are in the age bracket between 40 and 44, while 5.1 percent are over age 45. Men over 40 are half as likely to see their partners pregnant as men under age 25, according to studies. The miscarriage rate tends to be higher with older male sperm, and there appear to be links between the age of a father and the increasing incidence of schizophrenia and autism.

Researchers in Israel and the United States presented data in 2017 revealing sperm counts in men living in the West had fallen in the last 40 years by 59.3 percent, attributable to smoking, stress, obesity, pollution and exposure to chemicals in plastics, in large part. Where sperm is present, it becomes less healthy as it ages; less motile, likelier to result in fetal abnormalities. The ageing male is just as likely to be responsible for elusive fertility as is a female, age 35 and beyond.

Data from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority whose function is to regulate treatment, discovered last year that the most common reason when a couple seek out treatment was attributable to male fertility problems. One issue for males postponing parenthood is economic insecurity, not surprisingly. Lack of job security, hindering a search for a home, has its impact.

In the current world of boy-meets-girl, all too frequently contact is made on line. There are countless dating sites. People 'meet' one another far more often through the Internet than they do now in person. Among some, there is a prevailing notion that no one takes these contacts really seriously; they're meant to arrange the typical one-night-stand, or casual relationships, an attitude not conducive to forming long-term bonds.

When dating potentials take place online a personal element is missing, and it may seem to many as though the 'many fish in the sea' syndrome prevails; so many choices and so many opportunities to look around, greet and meet, and keep on looking. For men in particular a prevailing attitude of moving on as a compelling option should a woman they've chosen for a casual relationship convey her wishes for a deeper commitment.

According to the Office for National Statistics in the U.S., the proportion of childless women has, in a single generation doubled; close to one in five women will remain childless. Women generally now give birth to their first baby at 28.8 years, with more becoming new mothers in their 40s than their 20s. Concurrently, the incidence of single-person families has grown exponentially.

• It takes longer: If a man is over and the woman is under 25, it can take about two years to get pregnant. On the other hand, if both partners are under 25, it takes just over 4.5 months, on average.
• In vitro fertilization (IVF) becomes more challenging: The risk of not having a baby after IVF is more than five times higher if the male partner is 41 years old or older.
• Semen volume decreases with age: The amount of semen a man produces, as well as the sperm's ability to move towards an egg, decreases continually starting at the age of 20.
• There's a higher risk of miscarriage: Believe it or not, a father's age can even impact the likelihood of the baby surviving in the womb. The risk of the woman having a miscarriage is twice as high with a male partner over the age of 45 as it is with a male partner under 25.
• Autism risk increases: Children fathered by men older than 40 are more than five times as likely to have an autism spectrum disorder than those fathered by men under 30.             Source: verywellhealth

The Neighbour Who Cares

"Every eight-yer-old is different, every neighbourhood is different, and every parent is different, so you can't make an overall judgement like that."
"Apparently whoever called the police didn't think the police were a good enough judge of what was okay and not okay."
"Then they called DCFS [Department of Children and Family Services]. The police did not call DCFS."
"The funny thing is … I’m a joke with my friends because my kids are around me all the time. These are upper-middle class, stay-at-home moms [her friends] who have been investigated because someone didn’t have anything better to do with their time and called the police on them."
"For something like this to happen to me, there’s something really wrong. She was gone for five minutes. I was in the backyard and I could see her through the yard."
"Everyone needs to allow the parent to do what is best for their family. No one will dictate my parenting choices."
Corey Widen, 48, mother, Wilmette, Illinois

Corey Widen (right), daughter Dorothy and dog Marshmallow near their Wilmette, Illinois, home

Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty

Parents have a duty and an obligation to teach their children many social and personal lessons, building on their natural traits as they learn how to become disciplined and responsible individuals. And Dorothy Widen's mother Corey, took her responsibility as a mother seriously. When her children clamoured, as children do, to have a family pet she considered their request and spoke to them about their zeal for the pleasure of having a little dog around, having to match the level of personal responsibility they would exhibit in learning to take care of that pet.

Most parents know that when their children wax enthusiastic about the sweet little dog they see being walked by someone on the street and how wonderful it would be to share a little companion animal of their own, that it is they, in the long haul, that will have to do the required maintenance work once the excitement of acquiring a family pet has become normalized with the pet in place and no one wanting to offer to do the work of care, feeling satisfied with doing the playing about with the pet.

Corey explained in an interview that when she and her children discussed acquiring a pet it was with the proviso that they would have to share all the responsibilities of pet care, including walking their pet. In the interests of teaching her daughter Dorothy, eight years of age, a little responsibility and giving her a sense of independence along with it, she allowed Dorothy to go out with leashed Marshmallow for a walk on August 2nd.

A neighbour, seeing the child and the dog and no adult accompanying them reported to police, claiming a child who looked about five years old was walking a dog on her own. The concerned neighbour has not been identified. Wilmette police in their response to the call visited the Widen home, arriving just as Dorothy returned from her walk with Marshmallow. When Dorothy saw police at the door linked to her walk with her little dog, she was understandably upset.

"I was like really scared. I saw the police just there, like the police's car and I heard the like sirens going off", Dorothy later recalled of her experience. While no charges were filed after the police spoke to the family, swiftly determining there was nothing awry, the investigation was dropped. The unnamed neighbour, however, forged on, contacting the Illinois DCFS which launched a weeks-long investigation of their own.

The DCFS representatives interviewed family members, family friends and went so far as to interviews the pediatrician looking after the Widen family, eight-year-old Dorothy and her 17-year-old brother. As it was explained by a spokeswoman from the DCFS, when a complaint is lodged the agency doesn't know whether it represents a legitimate concern until it investigates. When it did so in this instance the agency closed the case since nothing amiss was revealed.

So is this an instance of a 'neighbour's' legitimate concern for the welfare of an under-age child exposed to a situation that could be a problem for that child's safety, just doing the responsible thing by alerting authorities when she could have approached the mother to discuss her concerns and have them allayed? Or is it conceivably a malicious intervention by someone who disapproves for whatever personal reason of the family concerned?

Does this call for the police laying charges of unjustifiable mischievous slander against a neighbour by a nasty character posing as a social conscience?

Wilmette, Illinois, resident Corey Widen was investigated by the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services after an anonymous caller reported that her daughter was walking the family dog alone.WBBM