Hannah Seligson of Women’s Wall Street blogged about the constant (and in my opinion, media-created) conundrum of balancing family and career, using a Huffington Post piece by Cathie Black as her starting-off point. Like most women who write about “having it all,” Seligson lost me in her first paragraph:

Having it all sort of sounds like a nebulous term. But I think for a lot of young women it’s pretty defined. They want to be married by 30, have their two children by 35, a satisfying and semi-lucrative career along the way, and look great in their yoga pants during all this careering and child-rearing. And did I mention also be able to throw impromptu dinner parties and bake cupcakes that would make Julia Child and/or Martha Stewart proud.

My first thought was ‘why wait until 30 to get married and 35 to have kids?’ Naturally, my second thought was that yoga pants are already a lost cause for me, probably because I do bake (and then consume) cupcakes that would make Julia Child proud.

For me, marriage and children are the natural steps that follow graduation and landing a decent job. I think it makes more sense to have children at 25 than 35 (provided you are in a stable marriage and have stable jobs), because a 25-year old parent is going to have more energy. If both parents work full-time (or even if one works part-time), they still need to come home and work a second shift as parents, chasing around toddlers and carting kids to soccer practice. And if one parent stays home with the kids, he or she is going to need energy to chase toddlers full-time.

Obviously, my time line won’t work for everyone. It depends on meeting the person you want to marry fairly early, which can be extremely difficult. Other women also care more about having high-powered careers than I do, in which case they might want to put in more time building that career before having kids. And as Samantha pointed out in her post below, cultural expectations about the appropriate age for marriage differ greatly between geographical locations. They differ even further between heritages, religions and education levels.

But here’s where Seligson really gets it wrong:

Great, but deep satisfaction, isn’t that one of those elusive states that people talk but rarely achieve? Black says not so. She believes (and is a living example) that if women can tune about some societal expectations and fear mongering about their biological clocks, women can figure out what they want on their own terms.

I’m sorry, but is “fear mongering” really the right term here? Where I come from, that’s called common sense, or, in some cases, stating the obvious. Her link takes you to a 2003 CBS 60 Minutes segment about the fact that young women who want to have it all often mistakenly believe that fertility lasts forever, and that there is no harm in putting off having kids until your 30’s or 40’s. As the article points out, fertility starts to drop off as early as 30, and drops precipitously in your late thirties.

When a group of fertility doctors put out an ad campaign that reminded women of these basic facts, Kim Gandy of NOW objected to what she saw as scare tactics. OK, Gandy and Seligson, say it with me now: “Facts you don’t like” does not equal “fear mongering.”

The rest of Seligson’s post is pretty much bromide after feel-good bromide, ending with this crazy idea that what really matters isn’t having it all, but focusing on what makes you happy. She even manages to sneak in the word empowering, a sure sign that she was on a deadline.

As a side note, I really enjoy reading the blogs at Women’s Wall Street. They can be a good resource if your financial education is a little bit shaky.