December babies aren’t necessarily likely to enjoy standalone birthday parties because let’s face it, the closer your birthday is to the Christmas holiday season, the less likely you are to plan — or get — a separate party. And while December babies may sound like they’ve drawn the short end of the birthday stick, surveys and studies indicate that in fact, the time of the year they were born might actually be giving them a special edge.
For starters, December babies appear to live longer on average. A study reported in the Journal of Aging Research shows that more people who lived to be 100 — or more — were born in December, which seems to suggest that at least, statistically speaking, a person is more likely to live to be 105 if they were born in December. On the flip side, babies who were born in June appeared to have less of a chance of reaching their 100th birthdays.
December babies might be less moody
Do you want your child to be (mostly) sunshine and smiles? Have your babies in December! It may seem counterintuitive, especially if you consider how grim, dark, and depressing winter can be (especially after the holiday season), but a Hungarian academic found that the season you are born in seems to affect your chances of developing mood disorders.
Xenia Gonda, an associate professor at Semmelweis University in Budapest, found that while people with a tendency to be excessively positive were either born in the spring and summer, those born in the winter were liable to be less crabby overall (via The Atlantic). Summer-born kids tended to experience more mood swings than their winter-born counterparts, too, which is another special trait December-born people have.
December babies might have an edge in sports
Medical researchers also say a birth month can also indicate whether a child might be better at sports — at least when they’re younger, anyway. UK researchers who examined nearly 10,000 boys and girls from state schools in Essex found that children born in the fall months of November, and then October (in that order) had more stamina and power than their peers, with December children following not far behind.
But as it turns out, this advantage disappears when the children are older (via The Guardian). UK Sport’s head of performance pathways Natalie Dunman says, “Looking at elite, senior athletes, there are many factors that go into making a champion, and our work hasn’t uncovered anything to suggest that month of birth is one of the key ingredients.”
So while your December-born babe might not hang on to his or her early-onset athletic prowess, it’s still pretty neat that they could be better at sports when they’re smaller.
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