NONFICTION - Feb. 10, 1991

LATECOMERS: Children of Parents Over 35 by Andrew Yarrow (The Free Press: $19.95; 240 pp.). The crazed over-35-year-old parent sees the title and thinks: Thank God, a book to tell me how to keep up with the diapered whirlwind! Uh-uh. This book is based on 70 in-depth interviews and a survey of 800 grown children of older parents. The new wave of older parents sneaks in toward the end of the book. And the sociological chasm between the two groups--older parents of 30 years ago often had five kids already, or hadn’t planned on having children at all, as opposed to the current spate of planned first children--makes “Latecomers” an oddity. Some lessons can be extrapolated (late parents be warned: Children become particularly embarrassed about you during adolescence, when appearance is paramount and you look so much older than their friends’ parents, so keep that gym membership current), but the substantial research seems sadly (even unfairly) limited.