August Birthdays
With Samantha Cameron having given birth in August, there has been a lot of talk recently about the disadvantage of August birthdays.
But it wasn’t always so!
Both my late wife and myself would have considered ourselves successful; she as a barrister and racehorse breeder and myself as a computer programmer, who helped create a multi-million pound company. We were both born in August many years ago.
Our most successful son of three is at the peak of his profession in London, despite leaving school with no qualifications at all. And he too was born in August.
So why this stigma against August births? Perhaps Leos and early-Virgos have a drive lacked by others, born in colder months.
I should say that some years ago I analysed all the birth weights for a year in an English county to see if we could find any patterns that might point to why some children were born with a low weight. One of the findings was that twins were more numerous eight or nine months after Christmas. Unfortunately, the data wasn’t good enough to know if the twins were identical or fraternal.
So I do wonder if some August children, having been conceived perhaps after a party, just want to get on with life and don’t succeed.
The Anonymous Widower 
Children born late in the school year are at a disadvantage as they are up to a year younger than the older pupils in the same school year. A year of difference is very significant, especially in the early years. There is clearly a distribution and there will therefore be people in that distribution that are at one end or the other i.e. do well and have a late birthday, or do badly and have an early birthday. There are also many other factors such as home background and inherited intelligence that affect school performance.
When I was at junior school (the peak year of the bulge) there we 50 children in the A stream class and 5 streamed classes in the year. I was the second youngest in the A stream class with a birthday in April.
It would be very interesting to see the strength of the correlation between educational performance and professional success. I suspect it is not as strong as we would be led to believe.
Comment by John Wright | August 28, 2010 |
I am an August birth as well, and a child when the August Bank Holiday was the first weekend rather than the last weekend of August as it is now, my birthday often fell on the that weekend. This mattered to a little girl because often her friends were on holiday when it was birthday party time.
My mother always told me how disadvanged I was becauyse of my August birth, I was the youngest or nearly youngest in the class, and the oldest in the class was 11 months older than me. I wasnt aware of the disadvantage, but my mother harped on about it and still does.
My daughters are both July birthdays, and have done well, their only regret is that all their school friends had their birthdays before them.
Comment by Liz P | August 28, 2010 |