Research Framework: Starting in the 1970s, contraception gave women and couples greater control over when and how to become a family. Around it, a broader transformation of the couple, the family and human lives and existences took place, imposing new constraints, especially temporal ones, on contemporary begetting. At the center of this new normative model, the conjugal project and parenthood are no longer immediately self-evident, and we describe how they emerge and are realized, or not.

Objective: To shed light on these new temporal constraints, the article will look at late parenthood, i.e. having a child at an “advanced” age (over 40 for women). As “late parenthood”, it is a good indicator of the new constraints and demands that are weighing on contemporary childbearing. As a “later-in-life” parenthood and under pressure of the “biological clock”, it exacerbates and makes visible logics that are usually diluted in everyday life. In this way, late parenthood is a good indicator of contemporary forms of begetting.

Methodology: The original survey was based on statistical analysis and 49 biographical interviews with parents from different generations. This article takes up the main results of the survey and discusses them in the light of recent literature and through the prism of life courses’ sociology.

Results: This article highlights the plasticity of the forms of transaction that enable people to enter into a project of begetting and becoming parents. Begetting cannot be reduced to a ballistic schema. We need to think of it as a performative process: hazards, events and interpretations can induce bifurcations or reformulations, making it possible to becoming parents. It underlines the importance of age, which, far from being forgotten, is a benchmark calculated and mobilized by women, men and couples, to situate themselves and act in the course of their lives and existences.

Conclusion: The article highlights the need to think about contemporary begetting in terms of constraints but also of agency and, more broadly, in terms of models of achievement.

Contribution: The proposed analysis of the normative model of begetting, its temporal framing and the transactions between spouses is a contribution to a sociology of human lives and existences.

• begetting
• couple
• journey
• parenthood

https://journals.openedition.org/efg/21664