Children of older mothers are healthier, taller and obtain more education than children of younger mothers, according to a new study.
Researchers say that health and educational opportunities improve year-by-year, meaning it pays to be born later.
Most previous research has suggested babies born to older moms have an increased risk of Down Syndrome and are more prone to developing diseases such as Alzheimer’s, hypertension and diabetes later in life.
But researchers from the London School of Economics and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, in Germany, say that the positives of older motherhood outweigh the negatives.
They found that when mothers delayed childbearing, even as old as 40 or older, they had children who were taller, had better grades in high school, and were more likely to go to university.
Lead researcher Mikko Myrskylä explained, “A child born in 1990, for example, had a much higher probability of going to a college or university than somebody born 20 years earlier.”
The scientists looked at data from over 1.5 million Swedish men and women born between 1960 and 1991 including siblings who shared the same parents and who grew up in the same house.
The research was published in the Population and Development Review.