"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.

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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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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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