"Winter Babies" are different from "Summer Babies"


The three graphs above show that women who give birth in winter months (blue dots) tend to be younger, less educated, and less likely to be married compared to mothers who give birth during the summer months (green dots).  The data displayed some  trends for the time period shown (1996-2001), but the summer/winter discrepancy remained surprisingly constant.

These data, reported by economists Kasey Buckles and Daniel Hungerman at the University of Notre Dame, may offer an explanation for the observation that, compared to "summer babies," those born in winter months tend to do more poorly in school, are less healthy, earn less, and have shorter lifespans.

The mechanism behind these relationships, alternative explanations, and a long comment thread are available at the primary link.

Link, via Salon.

Actually, if you look at the graph, mothers of winter babies tend to be younger. There is a higher percentage of teenage mothers in the winter.
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Nah, I was born in May and my life sucks. I duno about these statistics other then showing that university girls get knocked up on winter vacation, and high school girls get knocked up on spring break. But even then, the time it takes for conception can be anywhere between 6 months to a year. But I agree it can be fun to draw conclusions with just coincidence then believe it actually means anything.
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"The three graphs above show that women who give birth in winter months (blue dots) tend to be older..."

I think you mean younger, as the graph shows that a higher percentage of women giving birth in January are teenagers.
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I love research like this as it is usually born of the impetus to use research funding before it expires. Quick! Grab any thesis, send some surveys out and publish the data!
As a winter baby with a PhD born to an optical engineer and small business owner, I disagree with their findings.
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The percent differences look pronounced in the graph but if you look at the numbers only it seems trivial. I mean really, what's the difference between 12.6 years of education and 12.7? An extra 36 days of official education separates an idiot from a genius?
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I would think that during summer months in a hot/cold climate, single women would be out and about more, and perhaps have more opportunities to have sex.

Married couples tend to have more sex in the winter as there may be less to do, and I think many couples like to plan for a summer baby for various reasons. Just from a comfort perspective, women who plan a pregnancy tend to choose the winter months so as not to be huge/heavy/uncomfortable during hot summer months.

Just a theory
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Wow.. how soon we all forget! Prom is usually in May... Babies follow in Jan & Feb.. Never underestimate the social effects of the "last great event" of high school... (graduation is a lower level event on the social scale in Texas).
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Ignoring the insignificance of the 0.1 year difference in education, the cyclical nature of the data is interesting and makes it look like more than just noise. It also makes the data look too clean to be real.

I wonder how they justify that the trend sharply increases going into May and just as sharply decreases going out. What makes May so unique? I also wonder how they would describe the kink in the data found between May and the next January.
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Richard Wiseman's book Quirkology had a section about a marked difference between summer and winter kids. I forget the specific advantage- it may have been happiness or at may have been how lucky they felt they were. The advantage went to the summer babies.
Later a similar study was done in the southern hemisphere. Again, the kids born in the warmer months (in this case Dec, Jan, Feb) had the best advantage.

As a December 27th kid, I wonder how I'd have turned out if I made my debut in July?
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Huh, what? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! This article reminds me of Churchill. Trust no statistic that you didn't fake yourself. Anyway, what are the statistic principles? City / State / Country? Number or testers? Tester Background? Socio-economic background (for 3 generations)?

How come we ignore the supposed "psychologically approven" approaches when doing this blabla tests?

To prove the contrary: our "Winter" baby has a very intelligent mother (as well as father, both well educated at renown universities), is already beyond her actual age (8 months) and has more curiosity about her surroundings than many an elder peer. The exception that proves the case? No - statistics are pure bull shit. Thx for telling people they are dumb for having kids in Winter. If you can't differentiate between objective information an statistical manipulation, perchance you should consider a political job... Or maybe a banker: they make good money trying to tell people "things are a certain way because statistics prove it - although I have no clue about the study in case"...

Since when did Neatorama go yellow?
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