Women: Have Your Babies While You are Young--Healthier, Longer Living, More Intelligent Children

This newsreport points to research suggesting that children born to younger mothers tend to live longer:

People are more likely to see their 100th birthday, research hints, if they were born to young mothers.

The age at which a mother gives birth has a major impact on how long her child will live, two researchers from the University of Chicago's Center on Aging told the Chicago Actuarial Association meeting this spring.

The chances of living to the ripe old age of 100 -- and beyond -- nearly double for a child born to a woman before her 25th birthday, Drs. Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova reported. The father's age is less important to longevity, according to their research. More at source.

This newsrelease from Stanford suggests that if you want your children to be as intelligent as possible, you need to spend a lot of time with them in the early years:

Knudsen's findings about how experiences shape the brain's architecture help explain findings in both rats and monkeys, where early experiences translate directly to how the adults behave and learn. Co-author Judy Cameron, PhD, professor of psychiatry at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, has found that monkeys prevented from forming a strong bond with their mothers as infants go on to be less social, less likely to investigate new situations and more prone to anxiety as adults.

Shonkoff said the animal work has an important parallel in human development. For example, kids who are abused or neglected, whose parents are compromised by drugs, alcohol or depression, who are shuttled among relatives and foster-care placements or who spend long hours in poor-quality child-care programs don't develop the same brain power as kids with happier, more nurturing and stable childhoods. Those kids have less chance of securing skilled jobs when they grow up. They are also more likely to need expensive remedial help in school or-even more costly-rely on public assistance or serve jail time as adults. More at source.

This letter from Nature looks at some of the differences in brain growth mechanics between children of three different intelligence levels:

Children who are adept at any one of the three academic ‘R’s (reading, writing and arithmetic) tend to be good at the others, and grow into adults who are similarly skilled at diverse intellectually demanding activities1–3. Determining the neuroanatomical
correlates of this relatively stable individual trait of general intelligence has proved difficult, particularly in the rapidly developing brains of children and adolescents. Here we demonstrate that the trajectory of change in the thickness of the cerebral cortex,
rather than cortical thickness itself, is most closely related to level of intelligence. Using a longitudinal design, we find a marked developmental shift from a predominantly negative correlation between intelligence and cortical thickness in early childhood to a
positive correlation in late childhood and beyond. Additionally, level of intelligence is associated with the trajectory of cortical development, primarily in frontal regions implicated in the maturation of intelligent activity4,5. More intelligent children demonstrate a particularly plastic cortex, with an initial accelerated and prolonged phase of cortical increase, which yields to equally vigorous cortical thinning by early adolescence. This study
indicates that the neuroanatomical expression of intelligence in children is dynamic. Much more at source, with helpful graphs and illustrations. Hat tip Neurolearning Blog and Intelligence Testing blog.

Girls are born with their full complement of eggs. The older the woman, the older and more potentially damaged are the remaining eggs. Older women run higher risks of producing chromosomally damaged infants, or of simply being incapable of becoming pregnant.

Young women who intend having children should consider having them while they are in their twenties. Better to have children when you are young and strong and able to keep up with the little dynamos. Once they are well into school years, you can put most of your energies into your career, without worrying about the biological clock.

In addition, younger women possess greater attractiveness to potential fathers, evolutionarily speaking. If a woman waits for marriage and family until she is firmly established in her career, in her late thirties or early forties, her ability to attract the type of man she may wish as the father of her children will be diminished by the natural effects of time and life's stress. You may think an older woman can better choose a good father, given her greater experience, but in this situation the diminished choice can easily balance the greater wisdom of age.

Being politically incorrect is an enormous pleasure, an exhilarating luxury given to the self-employed.
:-)