Better Late Than Never, Some New Parents Say, but Others Aren’t So Sure : Families: Many older couples take delight in their young children. But they wonder whether they will have the stamina to keep up with their teen-agers.

Robert Anthony is already bracing for the day his 4-year-old son, James, scoffs at him for being old. But more daunting is the risk that he may not live to see that day.

“What if I’m a doddering old man, with a cane or a wheelchair?” said Anthony, a 59-year-old, healthy graphic artist. “Your father goes from being a hero to a schnook.”

“One of the things I think about is, when he’s a good deal older and when I’m 68 or 70, I hope I’m here to see it. I find life very precious now that I have this guy. I pay more attention to my physical activity. I’m watching my diet, my weight, my blood pressure.”

Anthony knows about fatherhood. The first time, he was a driven breadwinner in his 20s with a wife, two sons and an advertising world to conquer.

That was another lifetime. Success was his to make and take. He fell in love with someone else. The sons grew up. One made Anthony a grandfather two years ago.

What a difference 30 years make.

Now Anthony finds himself among the growing minority of Americans past typical childbearing age who are new parents. Like them, he takes unaccustomed delight in his young child. Like them, he worries whether he’ll have the stamina for his son’s teen-age years.

Like them, he finds enlightenment in books on parenting and enjoys the new domestic balancing act with his wife and business partner, Bernadette Evangelist, 45.

“The society is more accepting of these changing roles,” he said of his new world. “It’s nice.”

When he was young, Anthony’s family and career competed. Career often won.

“I was a good dad to the other guys,” he said. “(But now) there seems not to be trouble with the choices I had in my 20s. Life gets a different kind of focus. There isn’t too much to prove. Now James comes first.”

Robert Anthony is a happy man. Except for one thing. “There just ain’t much family around,” he said. “I feel, if not jealous, wistful that there isn’t a whole support system. It gets intense with just the three of us. We’re a little too much a closed universe.”

In another Eastern city, the universe also sometimes closes in on Elaine and her husband, Lee. She’s 54; he’s 56. Their 22-year-old daughter no longer lives with them. Their second child, Andrew, is a 14-year-old boy caught in the tempest of puberty.

The desire for children came over Elaine after years dedicated to her career as a college professor. But from the front lines of coping with a male teen-ager, Elaine issued a warning.

“What the media is doing is really fallacious,” Elaine said of reports extolling parenthood in middle age. “It can be exhilarating. But it can be difficult in the teen years. It can be stuff you’re not prepared for. I’m not sure it’s even fair for the kids.

“You’re just not the same. You hit on a new timeline in your life and it’s different from theirs. You’ve gone through so much in your life, but you’re beginning to unravel a lot of life’s mysteries. You start to get very wise . . . and when you become that way, you’re not as adept, you’re not into the stupidness (of adolescence).”

Elaine, who didn’t want the family’s name used for fear of hurting her son, gets exasperated with teen-age anger, with teen-age rebellion, with teen-age ignorance about life.

Lee is also a professor, and a weary father.

“I used to play a lot of ball, do physical things with Andrew, but he’s big and there are less things you can do. I can’t play tackle football with him. He could beat me at tennis now. I can still beat him at basketball.”

Still, it’s not all about sports.

“I am less authoritarian than a lot of other fathers. I get to pal around with Andrew, fool around, be at his level. I do that a lot, and that you expect to diminish with age. I’m probably better able to than I was 10 years ago to handle the emotional problems that come up.

“The only thing is, you do more want to just relax and not be bothered.”

When Betsy Looney embarked on maternity in 1962 at the age of 36 she seemed bold, maybe foolish. “I had college classmates who were on their fourth and fifth and sixth children when I was having my first,” she said from her home in Charlottesville, Va.

And conventional wisdom then, reinforced by scare stories in women’s magazines, said pregnancy past age 35 was a kind of Russian roulette in utero that risked producing a child with birth defects.

A recent study of nearly 27,000 cases of birth defects seems to contradict this notion, except for Down’s syndrome. In any case, prenatal tests such as amniocentesis make this much less a worry than in the past.

But Looney knew better long ago. A teacher whose father and husband both were doctors, she felt confident the chance of defects was small. She was right. On that memorable first-birth day she told her husband, William: “I feel like I have finally joined the human race.”

After glorious success with one son, she had another at 42.

Looney is 64. Her husband, a cancer researcher at the University of Virginia, is 69. Their sons are 23 and 29. The hardest part seems to be over.

“You don’t have energy, and that’s the big trade-off in this situation. But if you have children as late as we did, since you can avoid having children, you really want that child,” Betsy Looney said. “If you really want that child, you put all you can into that child.”

The Looneys learned that a teen-ager in the house gives parents a chance to revisit their own turbulent youth, whether they want to or not.

“Sixty and 16 don’t have a lot in common,” Betsy Looney said. “On the other hand, our children knew what our standards were. There was no question in their minds what we thought was responsible behavior. I think they felt acutely (that) it was important to be moral, decent people. With an awful lot of luck, we missed the drug culture.”

For his part, William Looney sees just one drawback in being an older parent while his sons, one a writer, the other in college, are still finding their way.

“To be established professionally, this creates a burden on my two sons. They say, ‘My God, the old man has done all this,’ ” he said.

Betsy Looney has a favorite story. It’s all the assurance she needs that the Looneys did well by their boys and that the timing was just right.

“My younger son brought home a friend who had grown up in a school bus; his mom and dad were hippies. My son said, ‘Guess what Robert said? He said, ‘I liked your mom and dad, and they’ve never been divorced!’ ”