RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Having children after 40 is becoming more common, with births to women over 40 surpassing births to teenagers in the U.S. since 2023.
Every year, we are treated to glossy Glambots of A-Listers over 40 cradling their baby bumps—the most recent being Anne Hathaway, Sienna Miller and Natalie Portman—exposure that continues to normalize the cultural shift. But while welcoming a child in "middle age" has become more common, it is safe to say that comparatively older parents stood out like sore thumbs in the '90s and 2000s, when the average age of a first-time mother was younger.
Zella Whitfield, 24, knows that all too well. Her parents were 47 when she was born in the early 2000s. Her mom is now 72, while, to put it in internet terms, her frontal lobe still has not finished developing. Still, despite the challenges having older parents comes with, she would not have it any other way.
Whitfield, a model and content creator from Cornwall, England, and now based in Wales, was conceived naturally, without IVF—itself a rarity for a pregnancy at 47. She told Newsweek that for much of her childhood, the age gap between her parents and everyone else's simply did not register.
"I never really thought about the fact my parents were much older until I was a teenager," Whitfield, not her legal surname, said. "But now I think about how strange it must have been for my mom trying to connect with the moms of my school friends, because most of them would have been 15 years younger than her."
The dynamic, she believes, is part of what makes her story resonate so widely whenever she shares it online.
"I think people are really interested by the story because it's controversial," Whitfield, who goes by @imzelfish on TikTok and Instagram, said. "Some people find it strange or they even don't think people should have children at an older age, but I don't agree with that, I think older parents can be incredible.
"Mine were so wise and had so much life experience, I learned so much from them. And having a sister nearly 20 years older is one of the best things in my life. I'm so thankful that I grew up the way I did."
Despite the love she has for her immediate family , Whitfield is candid about the trade-offs of their age gaps.
"The first bad one is the obvious one, that I get less time with them," she said. "In fact, I already lost my dad earlier this year. I feel like I had to come to terms with that fact at a very young age, that I would have to lose my parents at a much earlier time than most of my friends.
"I feel very lucky that I made it to 24 with both of them."
But the stability that came with older, more established parents, she said, outweighed the losses.
"Because they were already later on in life, I had an extremely stable childhood," she said. "They already had their careers established, whereas I think a lot of people when they were little remember their parents really struggling.
"Mine already had everything figured out."
Still, that stability came with its own friction, especially when it came to modern technology and evolving social norms.
"I felt like they were very out of touch with me when I was a child, I felt that they didn't understand my problems," she said. "The world that I was living with, with the internet and later, social media, was not on their radar.
"My dad was just stuck in the 1970s. I had to always tell him off for saying things he shouldn't be saying!"
She also grew up without the extended family many of her peers took for granted.
"Another bad thing is that I never knew my grandparents," she said. "I had one grandparent when I was born and he died by the time I was five.
"There was just no one my age in my family ."
Whitfield's account lands amid a broader demographic shift .
The mean age of mothers in the U.S. rose from 28.7 in 2016 to 29.6 in 2023 , according to National Vital Statistics Reports published by the National Library of Medicine, with similarly upward trends for second, third and higher-order births over the same period.
The change at the older end of the spectrum has been even sharper, with birth rates among women aged 40 to 49 climbing by 24 percent nationwide between 2015 and 2024, and the share of U.S. births to women 40 and older tripling since 1990, reaching 4.3 percent in 2025. The shift is showing no sign of slowing down.
For Whitfield, those statistics are simply catching up to an experience she has lived with her whole life—one she has come to see not as a disadvantage, but as a defining part of who she is.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Kara Dolman and Emma Lee-Sang
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