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A New Explanation For the Plight of Winter Babies
Ant passes along a Wall Street Journal report on research that turned up a new explanation for the lifelong challenges experienced by winter babies. "Children born in the winter months already have a few strikes against them. Study after study has shown that they test poorly, don't get as far in school, earn less, are less healthy, and don't live as long as children born at other times of year. Researchers have spent years documenting the effect and trying to understand it... A key assumption of much of that research is that the backgrounds of children born in the winter are the same as the backgrounds of children born at other times of the year. ... [Economist] Mr. Hungerman was doing research on sibling behavior when he noticed that children in the same families tend to be born at the same time of year. Meanwhile, Ms. Buckles was examining the economic factors that lead to multiple births, and coming across what looked like a relationship between mothers' education levels and when children were born." Here's a chart in which the effect — small but significant — jumps out unmistakeably.
There's a tendency for promiscuous, uneducated teenagers to have unprotected sex during springtime and early summer. It's always easy to say this, but, duh...
Much more important is the lack of error bars, they are what you can use to decide if the difference is greater than noise. However since they seem to be confident enough to include a secondary maximum and minimum, we are led to assume that the error bars are rather small. Since TFA says the study looked at 52 million children over 12 years, it sounds fairly reasonable to suggest that error bars are relatively small w.r.t atleast the primary max an min.
You could do better... if you were born in June.
The real causative in winter babies is that babies born under winter's astrological signs have shorter lifelines.
The age cutoff for entry to kindergarten seems to cycle around mid-September, but varies quite a bit from state to state. But in general, a kid born in the winter will have to wait longer to start school.
I was born in December and pursuing double masters with GPA of 3.4 is it really bad?
I was born in June, and received a Ph.D by the time I was 27, with a 3.95 GPA. Luckily for me, part of that Ph.D training involved learning that the word data is not the plural of anecdote.
It's a good thing, too, because your comment might otherwise serve as the first brick in the foundation of my claim that summer babies are caustic and monumental shitheads that seem to spend their free time in pissing matches.
Sigh. Correlation means one of three things with regard to causation. In this case those are:
a) being born in the winter causes increased risk of health and education problems for the baby
b) the baby's increased risk of health and education problems causes him or her to be born in the winter (clearly ridiculous)
c) a third factor causes the baby to both be born in the winter and have increased risk of health and education problems.
The correlation between birth month and risk of health and education problems has been observed. This study is pointing out that the direct causative option (a) is probably not true since they have found possible third factors (c) that appear to influence birth month and are known to have an effect on the risk of health and education problems.
In other words, the study is saying, with actual data and without the childish, misunderstood slogans, the same thing you are - birth month does not cause increased risk of health and education problems.
Showing correlation is required for establishing a causative link between two observations so no, correlation studies do not "need to die." It would be nice if people (including you) understood them a little better though.
From TFA:
The two economists examined birth-certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 52 million children born between 1989 and 2001, which represents virtually all of the births in the U.S. during those years. The same pattern kept turning up: The percentage of children born to unwed mothers, teenage mothers and mothers who hadn't completed high school kept peaking in January every year. Over the 13-year period, for example, 13.2% of January births were to teen mothers, compared with 12% in May -- a small but statistically significant difference, they say.
--end-quote
So problem is more than adequately explained by being born to a teen mother, and winter birth need not be related at all.
Winter birth is probably attributable to spring break, and the re-emergence of summer fashions (read: skimpy) and horny young guys after a hard winter.
The real story is births to teen mothers burdens not only the mother, but also the baby. Winter has nothing to do with it.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Much more important is the lack of error bars, they are what you can use to decide if the difference is greater than noise. However since they seem to be confident enough to include a secondary maximum and minimum, we are led to assume that the error bars are rather small. Since TFA says the study looked at 52 million children over 12 years, it sounds fairly reasonable to suggest that error bars are relatively small w.r.t atleast the primary max an min.
TFA also says that the 52 million children in the sample were all of them, making the sample 100% of the population. That should result in some pretty small error bars, indeed!
The two economists examined birth-certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 52 million children born between 1989 and 2001, which represents virtually all of the births in the U.S. during those years.
I am not a crackpot.