Boys are able to get a girl pregnant when they begin to produce sperm in their semen. This generally begins when they start puberty, which can be from ages 11 to 14. Until puberty begins, males are unable to get a female pregnant.
Although most men are able to have children well into their 50s and beyond, it becomes gradually more difficult after the age of 40 . There are many reasons for this, including: Sperm quality tends to decrease with age.
Raghav became the world's oldest father at age 94 when his first child was born in 2010. He broke his own record in 2012 when at the age of 96 he had another son. Julio Iglesias Sr. Ecclestone is the former head of Formula One motor racing; he previously had children in 1955, 1984, and 1988.
5 years old
Lina Medina, from the Ticrapo District of Peru, gave birth by cesarean section in Lima at age 5+1⁄2.
When Mollie Kaur fell pregnant aged 13, she was met with judgmental eyes and labelled 'Australia's youngest mum'. Six years on, a lot has changed for the now-21-year-old from Melbourne.
Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara is the oldest verified mother; she was aged 66 years 358 days when she gave birth to twins; she was 130 days older than Adriana Iliescu, who gave birth in 2005 to a baby girl. In both cases the children were conceived through IVF with donor eggs.
There's no maximum age that stops a man from being able to have a baby. You can become a father long into your older years, but there are risks.
Valentina Vassilyev and her husband Feodor Vassilyev are alleged to hold the record for the most children a couple has produced. She gave birth to a total of 69 children – sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets – between 1725 and 1765, a total of 27 births.
A woman's peak reproductive years are between the late teens and late 20s. By age 30, fertility (the ability to get pregnant) starts to decline. This decline becomes more rapid once you reach your mid-30s. By 45, fertility has declined so much that getting pregnant naturally is unlikely for most women.
Men, on the other hand, constantly produce new sperm and some men past the age of 80 occasionally father children. That fuels the myth that men remain fertile all of their lives and can parent children as long as they can perform sexually.
The oldest ever man to father a child was reportedly Les Colley (1898 - 1998, Australia), who had his ninth child a son named Oswald to his third wife at the age of 92 years 10 months. Colley met Oswald's Fijian mother in 1991 through a dating agency at the age of 90.
"[It's been] shown sperm counts do decline with age." But he says healthy men shouldn't worry about a decline to zero. "Men never stop producing sperm," he says.
Guys start producing spermatozoa (or sperm, for short) at the onset of puberty. Puberty starts at different times for different people. Boys usually start puberty when they're around 10 or 12 years old, though some start a little sooner and others a little later.
10 years old
U.S. The youngest father in Illinois 2001 was according to the published selected vital statistics 10 years old.
The man who is thought to have fathered the most children of all time is Moroccan Sultan Ismail Ibn Sharif (1645 to 1727) with a total of more than 1,000, according to Guinness World Records.
One study estimated a woman can have around 15-30 children in a lifetime, taking pregnancy and recovery time into account. Since men require less time and fewer resources to have kids, the most "prolific" fathers today can have up to about 200 children.
The Guinness World record for the heaviest baby to survive infancy belongs to a boy weighing 22 pounds, 8 ounces, who was born in Aversa, Italy, in 1955. In 2019, a New York woman named Joy Buckley gave birth to a daughter who weighed 15 pounds, 5 ounces.
Across America, there are approximately 18.3 million children who live without a father in the home, comprising about 1 in 4 US children (Father Absence Statistics). The United States has the highest rate of children living in single-parent households of any nation in the world (Kramer, 2021).
There's no expiration date on when guys can father a child. Case in point: Rocker Mick Jagger just had his eighth child at the age of 73. Since men don't hit menopause—the time in a woman's life where her fertility ends—they can typically continue to father children into their later years.
While fewer than 1 percent of first-time fathers are over 50, there are benefits to being a later-in-life father. Dr Paul Turek, a men's health and fertility urologist, says that men who have children at an older age tend to live longer. As an added bonus, their children tend to live longer as well.
Am I too old? While certain risks may rise with age, men continue to produce sperm throughout their lives and can father healthy children into old age.
That said, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) shares that any woman of any age can get pregnant — with medical help — provided that she has a “normal uterus” even if she no longer has ovaries or ovarian function.
Menopause. Natural cessation of ovarian function and menstruation. It can occur between the ages of 42 and 56 but usually occurs around the age of 51, when the ovaries stop producing eggs and estrogen levels decline.
Susie and Tony Troxler became first-time parents at 50 and 61. They say their daughter Lily is the poster child for hope. Their fertility journey is inspiring people everywhere. Susie and Tony Troxler became first-time parents at 50 and 61.