Do babies born in winter fare worse?

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.

Recently a new study by two professors at the National Bureau of Economic Research theorizes that babies born in winter fare worse because their mothers are poorer and less educated.

"What we're actually doing is asking how children born at different times of year might be different at birth, said Kasey Buckles, one of the authors of the study. "And we think an important way that they're different is that they're born to different types of families."

"Past studies have argued that children born in the winter have lower wages because they get less education," said Dan Hungerman, the other author. "We're showing that children born in the winter are often born to women of a lower socioeconomic status and that fact might explain both the education result and the wage result."

To do the study, the authors collected data on over fifty million births from all parts of the United States. "Women who give birth in the winter are more likely to be without a high school degree, they're more likely to be non-married, they're more likely to be teenagers than other women," concluded Hungerman.

When you read their research more closely, you find out that women who give birth in winter are 10% more likely to be without a high school degree and also about 10% more likely to be teen-aged mothers. This seems like a small fraction on which to base their conclusions. However, it must be noted that both are economists so, naturally, their focus is primarily on socioeconomic factors.

However, economic factors do not explain all aspects of the research. For example, how does the fact that mothers are teenagers and less educated explain research showing that babies born in winter have shorter life spans?

What they ignore are the psychological factors. It has been well established by research that there is more depression in the winter months as well as a higher suicide rate. It would seem to follow, then, that mothers who give birth in winter are more likely to suffer from depression. The question then becomes, how much does a mother’s depression affect the child in her womb as well as the baby after birth?

Also well established is research that shows that children of depressed mothers do not perform as well as other children in school, due to the fact that depressed mothers are too distracted by their depression to pay adequate attention to their kids. And the neglect of depressed mothers translates into lowered self-esteem of their kids, which does not bode well for their functioning as adults.

Yes, economy may well be a factor in the diminished functioning of winter babies, but psychology may be a bigger factor. But in today’s climate, the psychological factor is often swept under the rug.