I stumbled on this via Laura over at Eating With Your Anorexic, and expected it to be kinda silly.
To my surprise, some of it holds true for our family:
I have panic disorder; I was born in October.
My husband has dyslexia; he was born in July.
My younger daughter also has panic disorder, but she was born in July.
My older daughter had anorexia; she was born in February.
I have no idea what it means, though these people have attempted to make sense of it. Is this soothsayer science or is there some truth in here?
It's interesting to think about, either way.
10 comments:
Huh. Too bad we can't all be born in January or August.
Yeah, I'm a January baby with depression and anxiety, with alcoholics in my family born in July and August, etc. So I'm not sold--although I do totally love crap like this, and I'd be curious to see how they came up with it. :)
I don't mean to sound like a wet blanket, but what is it with this trend in the U.S. to define ourselves by our problems/disabilities/whatever?
MisKat
My Libra/Oct. son struggled with drug addictions for way too long, once he began in his teens.(many moons ago) It was a fight to get him to take anything when he'd get sick as a kid. Ironically, I came across a horoscope just yesterday which I saved from his birthday..."if you were born today"...and it said "you are more susceptible to drugs than most people." This was my baby they were talking about. It couldn't be true! My mother did the charts on everyone according to the time.
He's found ways to be his own guinea pig and only in the last few years has begun to catch up with life's responsibilities. My SIL took over 50yrs. to overcome her drinking and drugging and she too is a Libra. The most wonderful loving people, both of them, yet they both sank to the lowest of places, and both actually embraced their choice.
I'm a July baby and true to my Cancer sign, including a round moon face. Hell, I looked like a moon in my first year. I used to be more moody. Now I'm perfect...just kidding.
While I don't live by the signs/months I find them to be quite fascinating and fun to learn about.
While our birth month isn't part of our genetic code they may very well be a spiritual connection. I grew up with the knowledge that I selected my parents and place and journey. It's a wonderful come back when our kids say that they didn't ask to be born! Of course you did, and where and when and with whom, with us. : )
Course I believe we are all entitled to our own beliefs.
Do you think all cancers ramble?
I'm a February baby (a Pieces.) I'm also an amateur writer, in the field of psychology, and alcoholism runs in my family. All of this is said to indicate that I am much more likely to drink too much. I drink perhaps once a month; I have been drunk enough to be truly hung over once in my life.
This sort of stuff is fun, like many other personality theories (I've always liked personality theories) but the scientist in me says, "Show me the data." ;)
Dancinghawk
It's not bad science to do these kind of observational, population-based studies. They're great starting points for investigating public health issues. The problems start when people make more of the findings than is warranted. Often that kind of exaggeration or misrepresentation happens at the level of the popular or main-stream media's reporting about the research. Believe me, if you try to over-state your findings when you submit to a peer-reviewed journal, you get CREAMED by the reviewers.
What I take from this stuff is that our development is like that butterfly in the Amazon analogy (butterfly in a tree in the Amazon flaps its wings, 6mo later there's a hurricane in the Atlantic...). A myriad of known and unknown factors affect our development from the first mili-second to the very end. This may help us to know about, or it may merely be interesting, but of no practical use. At the very least we can understand that lots of big and small factors very much out of our control wind up influencing both how we physically develop and how we behave.
If there's anything "real" to this, I'm guessing it's pre-birth hormonal exposure - I'm sure pregnant mothers' hormones (like the ones produced by the pineal gland) fluctuate with the season and the amount of light. (An interesting, but impossible and unethical experiment would be to expose pregnant women to light regimes different than the season and see what happened to their kids down the road).
I just hope this isn't going to someday be justification for health insurers to, say, refuse to treat a February-born person for schizophrenia because it was somehow a pre-existing condition in their book.
The other thing is: I am SO ****ING SICK of things like this getting used as scare-stories in the media. We can't change when we were born, so what good does it do for them to tell me "You're more prone to develop schizophrenia because of when you were born." I mean, it's sort of an interesting finding, but you KNOW how the media's going to spin it - trying to scare would-be parents into conceiving at a time so they have an August baby, or make existing parents feel scared/guilty because their baby was born in a "high risk" month.
Ricki, you've inspired me to write my story of long ago when my little boy went off to kindergarten hoping to learn but his teacher decided that he was born in the wrong month and could wait to join his class in learning to read. It was all very deceitful, much like the fears you mention here...which seems extreme, if only I didn't live it. I know too well what happens when power is abused.
Anyway, it jogged this woman's memory! I will try to use my blog to share the story and get it out of my head.
Interesting, but it didn't hold true for me. I'm an anorexic, dyslexic August baby. Wish it held true though!
Also wanted to say thank you for the Love Your Body Pledge:)
Take care,
Angel
if it's to do with the season, should southern hemispherians use the opposite month?
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