Nowadays people don't always have the children they want, but rather the ones they can. If you ask a woman and a man how many children she has and how many she would have wanted to have, surely there are few who tell you the same figure: "I have two, but I would have liked to have three," "I have one, but I would have liked have two ", etc.
The reason? It may be a matter of space (they do not fit at home) or economic (they do not find it feasible to feed another mouth) or it may be a matter of age, having started having children too late. For this not to happen, Some researchers have managed to decipher the age at which a woman should be a mother according to whether she wants to have one, two or three children.
If you want to have a child
Motherhood has been delayed in recent years quite clearly. In the previous generation, that of our parents, children were born when they were just over twenty years old, but now the first child usually arrives when the woman is about 30 years old.
The researchers, from the University of Rotterdam, and after analyzing data on the natural fertility of 58,000 women until the 1970s, calculated that those who want to have only one child should try to have it before age 32. Until that age the chances of getting it are 90%. If they wait until the age of 37, the chances of having a child drop to 75% and at 41, only 50% of the women will succeed.
If you want to have two children
If you think that a child is not enough and that better two, you have to keep in mind that the second should arrive a time after the first (the ideal minimum time between pregnancies is 18 months). Then, as the second will arrive some time after the first, to keep the percentages the age must go down. The 32 years before no longer work.
If a woman wants to have two children I should be first at 27. That way you will have a 90% chance of fulfilling your dream. If, for whatever reason, the first reached 34 years, then the percentage would decrease to 75%. And if I were at 38, the chances of having a second child would go as high as 50%.
If you want to have three children
The last of the hypotheses they worked on was the possibility of deciding have three children. There are many couples who would like to have them, but not all of them do it, or not all of them do it (because sometimes, as we have said, wanting is not power).
According to the researchers if a woman wants to have three children she would have to have the first one at age 23. That way she would have a 90% chance of being a mother of three. 23 years? It is too early! Well, don't forget that we talk about percentages. As the years go up, the percentage goes down, but don't fear, because it doesn't really go down as fast as we might think. It is not until the age of 31 (to have the first one) when the percentage of probability falls to 75%. This means that between 23 and 31 the chances of success are quite high. Now, if motherhood is delayed until age 35, then the dream of having three may not be fulfilled, because at that age the chances of having three children is 50%.
To see it more graphically
If you want to see all the data graphically, in this image you have below, as a calculator, you have everything:
