Do you know in which month most babies are born in India? Contrary to the expectation or even your birthday, most babies in India are born in June. Is there a reason behind that? Let’s try and understand why there are so many summer babies?
Most babies in India are born in May, June, and July. According to the data from the year 1973-1999, June is the month when most children in India are born. However, the children born in these weeks are not too studious. Are environmental influences responsible for the number of births in this particular month?
The month with the highest birth rates, June, around 20 percent more children were born per day than in December when there was little birth.
Agricultural Changes And No Sex Before Marriage
The fact that most children were born in summer is explained by some experts by the fact that society is more strongly shaped by agriculture and influenced by the harvest season. If it was foreseeable in the summer that the harvest would be good, one could afford another child who was born nine months later in the summer. Sex before marriage is also a huge taboo. Therefore, more children were conceived after marriage. And they often get married in the summer.
Nowadays the times are changing as tradition is being questioned and sexuality is being removed from the taboo. The proportion of unwanted pregnancies decreased and births became more predictable. However, this does not explain why the number of births is high in the particular month of June. These contradictions appear again and again when one looks at the theories about the birth rate. There are all of these explanations but none of them seem to really reconcile with the data.
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Is Climate Change Causes So Many Summer Babies?
Other hypotheses see biological factors such as sperm quality in the foreground or environmental influences such as length of day and solar radiation. There might be an influence of climate change on the seasonal birth distribution.
When it is particularly hot in the days of conception, there are more miscarriages. In this increasingly warming world, with more heatwaves, there are less successful pregnancies in summer and therefore fewer births in spring. In any case, more number of births in summer is not a purely Indian phenomenon. Most European countries and the USA have a similar format.
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The month of birth can have a real impact on a person’s life. According to a study by Tamil Nadu & Karnataka State Board examination results, 2006 – 2012, children born before and in the month of July tend to have a harder time in class. School success can therefore also depend on the start date. Another study shows a connection between the month of birth and life expectancy. According to it, summer children live a little longer on average than spring children.