Older Parents: Often a Blessing for Kids : Families: As more couples delay parenthood, more children find a special kind of security blanket.

Carol Weston could hardly wait for her first child to be born. What stories she planned to tell Baby Elizabeth about Grandpa Weston, the man in the funny photo in the kitchen.

That’s Grandpa, chewing his cigar, standing bare-chested in his blue bermuda shorts, a pitchfork in one hand and his daughter in her wedding dress by his side: their suburban New York version of American Gothic. The stories are necessary because Grandpa is gone.

In the relay race of generations, most parents start out one short lap ahead of their offspring. Mom and Dad basically grow up with the kids.

For Weston, a writer, it wasn’t that way. Her father was 43 when she was born. She came into his life when he was an accomplished documentary filmmaker and television producer. William Weston had fought his battles. He was happy with himself, his new marriage and the novelty of parenthood.

Their relationship was intense, secure, fun--and when William Weston died at 68, Weston was just 25 and heartbroken.

“I was the apple of my father’s eye,” said Weston, now 34 with two daughters of her own. “When your father dies, you ask yourself, am I still an apple? For the rest of my life, I don’t have my father here, to play with my kids, to read my books.”

Weston was unusual among her friends in having a father old enough to be her grandfather. Such children aren’t so rare now. There’s a modest crop of babies being born to people who, had they followed a different timetable, might be bouncing grandchildren on their knees instead of balancing careers with feeding times and day-care schedules.

A common thread in interviews with grown children of older parents is the sense of security, of being cherished, a sense of growing up in a culture once or twice removed from that of their friends.

Children of older parents also learn early about death.

“There’s this sense of fragility, there’s a point you become less combative and more protective,” Weston said, recalling her early 20s, when she first noticed her father’s halting gait.

Cynthia Leland worries about her parents. Born when her mother was 43 and her father 45, the native Texan transplanted to New York is 27.

“My mom makes a point, when I go home, to be sure I know what the will says, that I know what’s in the vault.”

Although younger parents are apt to wrestle with a midlife crisis, asking ‘Who am I’ when their teen-age children are posing that question for the first time, older parents are likely to know.

They can give their attention and hard-earned wisdom to their children. This is one of the special gifts of the older parent.

“I can say that I’m spoiled. To be spoiled with attention is the greatest thing in the world,” said Mario Muller, a 28-year-old painter and sculptor in Louisville, Ky.

When Muller was born, his father was 62, his mother 38. He was an orphan by 19, but an orphan with a comfortable inheritance and a rich emotional legacy.

“The confidence of your parent in their self translates into a confidence in yourself,” he said.

His parents gave him something else he treasures, what Muller calls “out-of-syncness” with his own generation.

Muller’s parents were teaching him to love Mozart and the cha-cha while his friends went to Woodstock in 1969 with their parents. Muller’s friends had bean-bag chairs to climb on. He had a recliner.

This long leap between generations has happened before in America, though for different reasons.

The last time sizable numbers of women and men delayed parenthood into their 30s was during the Depression.

In 1970, about 14,000 women over 34 gave birth to their first child, out of 3.7 million births that year, federal health statistics show. In 1988, the number was up to 61,000 first births among women past 34, out of 3.9 million births.

“The patterns we see today are not new; they were the standard more than 60 to 70 years ago,” said Martin O’Connell, chief of the fertility statistics branch of the Census Bureau. It was too expensive to have children then. Couples waited.

“It wouldn’t surprise me, as the (baby boom) cohort got older and older, to even see increases in birth rates of women in their early 40s,” O’Connell said.

With the general increase in longevity and vitality, today’s first-time and middle-aged parent can expect to have more endurance for the long stretch through their offsprings’ adolescence--and beyond--than preceding generations.

“Becoming a grandmother at 70 now is probably not a whole lot different from becoming a grandmother at 60, 20 years ago,” said Miami University gerontologist Robert Atchley, national public policy chairman of the American Society on Aging.

Atchley doesn’t put much stock in comparisons between parenting at divergent ages. “Every relationship between parent and child is different,” he said.

“The good news for later parenthood is people are a little more oriented to being altruistic,” Atchley said.

With older parents being relatively uncommon, little research has been done to find out if it makes any difference. But a decade ago, Corinne N. Nydegger, a professor of medical anthropology at UC San Francisco, tried to learn about the timing of parenthood by probing the relationships between 300 older fathers and their children.

For boys it didn’t seem to make much difference, Nydegger said. Girls were another story.

“Older fathers seem to make much better fathers for their daughters, and their daughters are more likely to be oriented to the world,” Nydegger said. “Girls blossom. The older fathers have a little bit more difficulty with some sons, especially more athletic ones.”

By the time the children were grown and the relationships with their fathers had stabilized, however, Nydegger found that what mattered most in making a good father was that he encouraged his children.

“The general tenor of relationships of older fathers with both sons and daughters is calm,” Nydegger said. “The free expression of emotion, older men tend to be more comfortable with. They’re more self-aware as fathers, think about it more and more objectively.”

In sum, she said: “Maturity works.”