The Curse of the Calendar
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Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario and Saskatchewan. Here’s this week’s on the correlation between birth month and success in school and sports.
Hoping to get pregnant soon? Just want to let you know that for the sake of your baby, your window for 2013 is rapidly closing. That’s because if you want your child to excel at sports or at college, you really want that child born in the first four months of the year.
I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers, and here’s an interesting story he tells. Back in the 1980s, sociologist Roger Barnsley was attending a Lethbridge hockey game with his family when his wife drew his attention to the team’s roster. “Look when these kids were born,” she said. He did, and he noticed something strange. Almost all the players were born in January, February and March. So he began looking into other teams and he found the same thing. What about the NHL? Yep. Most players were born in the first few months of the year.
Does this mean that January babies are naturally better athletes? No, not at all. It’s just that when you have a team of 6-year-olds, those born in January will tend to be a lot bigger than those born in December. So when rep teams are chosen, the bigger kids will tend to be picked. These kids will then get even more practice and better coaching, which will further cement the difference.
I was curious about this so I looked up the only three hockey players I could name off of the top of my head: Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, and Gordie Howe. Their birthdays? The Great One was born in January. The other two were born in March.
It reminded me of a study recently done by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which found that children referred to pediatricians for ADD were predominantly born at the end of the school year. When my husband and I ran the numbers from his pediatric database, we found the same thing. Hardly any January babies, but a ton of December babies. Now those who were actually diagnosed with ADD tended to be randomly distributed, because it is biologically based. But those who were referred for it were clustered at the end of the year, meaning that many teachers and parents were mistaking immaturity for inattention.
This effect seems to hold true across a variety of measures. November and December babies are 12% less likely to go on to university, and more likely to end up in poverty, likely because they fall behind in school more often. It’s not a case of innate capabilities; it’s simply that the world is built for the average, not for those on either end. Therefore, on one end you have major benefits, but on the other end you could have major problems.
I’m not sure what the solution to this is, except to stop grouping people solely by year of birth. Yet what other option do we have? Skill level? How do you assess that in young children? Height/weight? How would that work, since children go through such tremendous, and sporadic, growth spurts? Or we could go to the opposite extreme and group people even more by age. If schools have two grade one classes, for example, one could be January-June and one could be July-December.
Maybe there is no good solution except to realize that we are not truly a meritorious society. We think that we operate solely based on merit and skill; the smart and the athletic will always rise to the top. Yet sometimes they won’t. Some people will simply have to work harder to get ahead.
Perhaps, in the end, it’s just an early lesson that life isn’t always fair.
UPDATE: This column has been amended to include additional research information.
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Related posts:
The Curse of Low Expectations for Teens
A Spry Grandma
September Resolutions
