“It was not an accident”: Women’s experiences of renewing motherhood at 40+

Abstract

In recent decades, there has been an increase in motherhood at an advanced age that has raised several medical and social concerns. We conducted a qualitative interview study, guided by Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, to focus on the motivations and experiences of Belgian women who ‘renewed’ their motherhood later in life, meaning they had one or several children and then (at least 10 years later) had another child at the age of 40 or older. We focused on ten women’s experiences of motherhood later in life, as well as on the way they managed social norms and expectations regarding family building and the appropriate life course. We identified two main themes. The first theme describes the participants’ encounters with social norms that challenged their decision to reproduce and parent later in life, and how they managed and anticipated criticism, surprise, disbelief and incomprehension about their renewed motherhood in various ways. The second theme shows how these women talked about taking responsibility as a (renewed) mother of advanced age. For them, responsible motherhood involved making thoughtful reproductive choices, attending to the range of needs of their children, and making extra efforts to safeguard the social and emotional wellbeing of their youngest children, thereby seeking to reduce potential harm resulting from these reproductive choices. This study provides insight into these women’s self-conception and their interactions with prejudiced social views of motherhood and family building.

Keywords:

• Advanced age motherhood
• reproductive timing
• social norms
• responsibility
• qualitative research

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Swiss-Belgian A-PAGE collaborative team (Dr. Andrea Martani, Steven Piek, and PD Dr. Tenzin Wangmo) for their valuable comments on this paper. In addition, the authors acknowledge PD Dr. Tenzin Wangmo (co-supervisor of the A-PAGE project) for contributing to the design of the project.

Author contributions

KV is the main author of this paper. She did the majority of the qualitative analysis and writing. BE, GP and VP contributed to the design of the study. NN, GP and VP were involved in multiple rounds of auditing during the analysis, joined in a later stage by BE. All authors were involved in the writing of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data supporting the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The data are not publicly available due to privacy restrictions.

Notes

1 Originally in Dutch: ‘Een slimme meid krijgt haar kind op tijd’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by SNSF-FWO Lead Agency under Grant 10001AL_197415/1 and FWO (Research Foundation – Flanders) under Grant FWO.OPR.2021.0001.01.