When men with handcarts and a good beer populate the parks of the Republic on Father’s Day, it’s worth taking a closer look at the gentlemen. Especially for graying or falling hair, prominent wrinkles and other signs of aging. Because Germans are becoming parents later and later. This applies to both men and women. But on average, men are significantly older than women, a full three years.
While women are on average 30.2 years old when their first child is born, the respective fathers are on average 33.2 years old. This was determined by the Federal Statistical Office in Wiesbaden for the year 2020. In 2015, fathers were still 32.8 years old on average. The authority has not yet processed more recent data.
It has been well researched why Germans always start families later in life. Before you decide to bring a child into the world together, one thing is important to many: security. And that is only given when you have reached a certain level of training, are secure in your job and the partnership relationships have been clarified.
“It’s also a status story”
With ever longer training times – especially, but not only for academics – the certainty that one has security in life slides further and further back in time. In addition, young parents have a hard time on the job market. Mothers are primarily affected. Fathers are not exempt, however.
But why are the fathers older, not the mothers? First of all, the answer is very simple: “That’s just the typical age difference in a relationship,” says Christian Dudel, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock. He is older in more than two-thirds of all relationships between men and women. For the majority of all couples, the difference is between one and three years. Much less often she is older than him.
Mainly because the man has the feeling that he has to be professionally secure and integrated when starting a family, he delays it. Dudel says: “It’s also a status story.”
That alone doesn’t explain the difference. At least not quite yet. In order to understand the figures from the Federal Statistical Office, you also have to know that when it comes to first births, data on women is primarily recorded. If a man already has a child with another woman, but is separated from her and is now the father of his new partner’s first child, then his age is also included in the statistics. Because both times he is the father of a firstborn child. Such cases can affect the average age.
Outliers are possible
In addition, the statisticians have calculated the arithmetic mean, so outliers can drive the value up. And in this case, outliers seem more likely among men. This is just biologically justified. Because while women eventually go through menopause, men can still become fathers in their fifties, sixties, seventies and even eighties – see Bernie Ecclestone. The British entrepreneur became a father two years ago at the age of 89. Little Ace is younger than Ecclestone’s great-grandson.
Will women and men be parents later and later in the future? “That is at least to be assumed,” says demographer Christian Dudel. “Especially in the case of mothers, we have been seeing a constant increase in the age of the first birth for a long time.” In the case of the fathers, for whom the data has not been available for quite that long, one cannot really speak of long-term observations, but here too there is still a trend upwards.
After all, it is unlikely that Father’s Day will ever be an event for men of Ecclestone’s age. Despite the age outliers and the possibility that it is a second or even third family: In Germany, men between the ages of 32 and 33 most often become fathers of a first-born child. And that comes pretty close to the mean published by the Federal Statistical Office.