In Europe around 1925, the average life expectancy for women was approximately 51 to 52 years. By the time their children were grown, many mothers were already nearing the end of their lives. Motherhood was not only a central role – it was often the only role that time and society allowed.

Fast forward to today, and even more so to 2050 – global life expectancy for women is projected to rise to 80.5 years by mid-century, and in many countries, girls born in 2047 could expect to live well into their 90s. That means a mom in 2050 might have 30 or 40 years of life after her kids leave home.

But just having more years doesn’t automatically make life easier or more fulfilling. So what’s it really like to have this extra time, and how do we navigate longevity in motherhood?

Moms and the Need to Be Needed

One thing I’ve noticed on myself is how much more attached moms today are to their children. It’s not just love; it’s almost a necessity. Historically, we didn’t expect to live long past our children growing up, have decades of free time, and invest in personal relationships outside motherhood because we simply didn’t have time. Now, suddenly, we do – but often we don’t know what to do with it. How else to fulfil the need to belong and be important.

It’s so common that at the University of Chicago, they have a staff member whose job is literally to extract kids from their moms when parents bring freshmen to campus. This role is specifically arranged to separate students from their parents help them step back, and let their kids to begin their independent lives.

The freedom to explore our own interests, friendships, and careers feels unfamiliar. Building our own new life requires energy and force (sometimes agains the social expectations), so instead, we pour ourselves into our kids’ lives, staying needed, staying involved, sometimes desperately so. Our role changes before we even know what is this that is expected from us now.

Body, Age, and Motherhood: Strength for the Years Ahead

Despite the life expectancy, menopause isn’t delaying along with it. Women born around 1910–1914 experienced menopause at an average age of 49.9 years. Today, it’s about 50 years globally, and projections indicate this will remain largely unchanged even as life expectancy rises. That means the fertility window hasn’t expanded, even though our post-childrearing years are much longer.

Midlife together with menopause brings measurable physiological challenges, and to navigate these changes, now we are turning to biohacking strategies, evidence-based approaches to optimise physical and cognitive health.

To keep our physical and cognitive functions sharp we do strength training – 2–3 times per week combats muscle and bone loss; nutrition protocols – Calcium, vitamin D, omega-3s, and polyphenols – to support bone, heart, and cognitive health. We pay more attention to our sleep and stress management techniques: mindfulness, yoga, and breathing exercises help regulate hormones and mental clarity.

Longevity only is good if comes together with good health. We want to maintain strength, flexibility, and mental clarity to remain fully active in life beyond active parenting.

Longevity Redefines Motherhood

Living longer is changing what it means to be a mother. For most of history, mothering ended once children reached adulthood. Today, longevity requires us, mothers, to shift from a relatively short-term hands-on parenting to a decades-lasting observing, guiding, and supporting based tactics that is essential for our kids later after they fully enter their life. The main task of parenting – prepare them for life is expanding. And we no longer define it by them leaving our home, but being actively involved in their successes and struggles through the whole thing. Parenting is not a project any longer (as it was a hundred years ago), but it is a lifelong experience that requires us to remain relevant.

This extended motherhood role comes with new responsibilities and stresses. Mothers face not only their own midlife challenges: health, energy, and career reinvention, but also the ongoing needs of adult children and grandchildren. Moms are not only inspirations as mother figures, but increasingly as professionals, experts, creators, and wise women. It’s one thing to advise a 20-year-old, but influencing a 40-year-old adult child is a completely different challenge – it takes wisdom, perspective, and understanding of a problem.

Those extra decades seeing your aging kids and mature grandchildren don’t automatically simplify life. Longevity doesn’t just add years—it adds complexity to the whole life and motherhood itself.

Are we really ready to harvest two slots of our own lives yet?

Preparing Your “Second Self”

In the 20th century, women survived motherhood; in the 21st century, we are beginning to see it as a process that only switches from main to simultaneously ongoing. We’ve always wanted more time for ourselves, to be forever young, and now we’re getting it. Are we ready to use it fully in our favor? Are we prepared for a new phase of motherhood that has never existed before? Do we know how to build and maintain relationships with aging children and adult grandkids of ours? Do we know how to live a fulfilling life ourselves, reenter university or the workforce, build new careers and new characters?