Why is absolutely everyone I know having baby boys!

[Needsomeadvice33]

I'm at that age where absolutely everyone I know is having kids. A large number are now on their 2nd kid. So me and my husband have no kids (happily childfree have 4 nephews no nieces) but we are so fascinated by the fact that absolutely nobody we know is having girls.
Literally in the last few years we are talking at least 30 boys and only 2 girls (one of which my friend told me she gender swayed for a girl and it took her like 10 months to get pregnant as she was actively avoiding ovulation).
It's became a joke that me and my husband say to eachother as soon as we hear of another pregnancy announcement "another boy then 😂".
Anyway I've been reading about the returning soldier effect where after World wars there's always far more boys born. There's a recent study regarding this.
Wonder if the pandemic has made men produce more y sperm 🤣.
Or is it perhaps because I'm at an age where women are actively tracking ovulation and with the popularity of ovulation sticks they are all having sex right at ovulation so more likely to produce boys. 🤔
Wonder what others make of this and are you all seeing the same.
Also seen there's a US nurse talking about it on tiktok.
nypost.com/2022/03/29/im-a-baby-nurse-heres-why-more-people-are-having-boys/

I think they should do a study to see if men produce more y sperm after having covid.

Many years ago, my DD started school in a village primary school. There were 60 children and only 8 boys in his year. Just a weird outcome that the village was full of 4/5 year old girls.

It is just coincidence and confirmation bias. I had the same - everyone in my friendship group had boys, and I have two sons. DS's nursery was majority boys. I started to wonder where all the girls had gone! Then DS1 started school and... he's one of 8 boys in the class, with 23 girls. They were there all along, it seems! (I think the nursery thing is because it's a forest school/very outdoorsy nursery and I guess people are less likely to choose that for girls, which is a bit depressing)

Most people I know had girls in the last few years.

Our local hospital puts out a Facebook post each month with their birth statistics. It’s a large maternity unit and their stats have been consistently around the average for boys:girls (which is slightly more boys born than girls each month). It hasn’t changed around here, although in the 13 years since having DC it’s often felt like ‘everyone’ is suddenly only having girls, or vice versa, so I think it’s just chance OP.

I should’nt worry.
If you believe everything you read on MN, at least 50% of these sons will end up identifying as daughters!

PleaseBeHonest funny you mention the older Dad thing - I'm sure I've read that older fathers are more likely to produce girls. My DH was in his 40s and a smoker when we started a family and we have three DDs.

www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/201104/why-are-older-parents-more-likely-have-daughters

In my NCT class all 7 of us had girls. 6 of us went on to have second babies and all 6 of us had boys.

I think coincidence too. Because there are only two sexes and real life randomness isn't perfectly distributed, you can get a run of one or the other fairly commonly. Try flipping a coin several times and see what the longest run of heads or tails you can get is. It's pretty easy to get a run of 5-6 and in terms of babies that would seem like loads, but perfectly possible with random chance.

Like in monopoly when somebody keeps rolling doubles and ends up in jail. Seems statistically unlikely, but usually happens at least a couple of times per game.

Same happened some years ago in our group, out of a class of 30, over twenty are boys. I couldn’t give my outgrown baby boy clothes to anyone 😀I knew

@TinySaltLick im not saying it definitely happens that way to guarantee a boy or a girl. But I was correcting a PP who stated it was the other way around. Generally x sperm do live longer.

Ive always said 'theres a war due'. Same thing here, all boys. I like to say this with my tinfoil hat on 😁 the returning soldier thing is curious though. Don't frogs send out male/female froglets depending on need?!

Haha Oyster that's great! Our NCT class was 7x boys, then 4 went on to have a second - also boys. 2 of us had 3 (also boys) and one 4 (another boy!)

We joked that the teacher had put a spell on us.

www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articles/archive/2015/08/boyorgirlitsinthefathersgenes.html

This link mentions the post-war boys theory as well.

Purely anecdotally, it is the other way round in my circle. So many girls being born.

I’ve noticed this myself honestly - 4 couples inc us each have 2 boys, then we had a girl, so 8 boys and 1 girl. Families full of boys. We know loads of boys. But when you go to baby groups etc it’s pretty equal.

I have DD's, 16 girls and only 2 boys in the winder family among the grandkids.

That is also incorrect - there are multiple studies on this, here is one:

www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcell.2019.00388/full

See viability section.

Also as you have suggested - it of course doesn't affect the outcome as otherwise we would see a distinct skew in one direction

My son in law’s family seem to have a pattern of the men fathering only boys. He is one of two boys, his brother has a boy and my dd and sil have two boys. In my case , when I was growing up I had 7 cousins only one of whom was a boy. I have one of each. Dd has two boys and ds has one girl.

@PleaseBeHonest

Had they adopted? In the USA when I lived there adopting from China for at least one child was very fashionable in the chattering classes. Always girls of course

I noticed that as well. In my son's primary , they had 21 boys/9 girls ratio. All my friends have mainly boys, with very rare random sprinkle of baby girls which they have purposefully tried for. I do feel that there is an imbalance in ratio and more boys are born.

The reason why it’s “always girls of course” is because since China introduced the 1 child rule (and even after they relaxed it) the unwanted children are almost always female. It’s not because the “chattering classes” don’t want boys.

It’s just way too small a sample size to be meaningful. 30 sounds a lot, but it isn’t, and there will be as many people who happen, randomly, to know of 30 babies born where the majority were girls.