Why do people time their pregnancies so their due date is September and not August?

[TwinkleStars15]

I’m curious to know why people time their pregnancy so that their baby is born in September/October and not August? I’m assuming it’s about the school year and maybe not being the youngest in their year?

I'm pretty sure few people time their pregnancies and lots of people have more drunken sex than usual around Christmas and new year...

If they did time their pregnancies though statistically children who are older for the school year are at an advantage, so yes, bloody good idea.

Also August when everyone is away is a shitty time to arrange a children's birthday party...

Agree with blueskies, I reckon it’s carelessness during the festive period that accounts for most of the September birthdays rather than deliberate planning. Where I live the school age cut off is 30th of June rather than 31st of August and yet there are still a huge amount of September birthdays.

By timing it you are assuming everyone just needs to have sex once to get pregnant? I have a September born but it’s not timed. We tried for 2 years and two MCs. It just happened to be a September baby but it could well be an August given the due date.

Agree with blueskies, I reckon it’s carelessness during the festive period that accounts for most of the September birthdays rather than deliberate planning.

I think it's a bit of both, but also the huge number of people who start trying for a baby in the new year. Look at the conception boards here - there's always a flood of incomers in January, and statistically about 20% of them will get pregnant that month and have September due dates.

My August baby is a result of November birthday sex.

My October baby is a result of valentines sex.

Schooling

I've never timed my pregnancies.

Christmas and new year nookie.

And the odd one who doesn't want their kid to be the youngest in the year at school.

Yep September birthday has a huge educational advantage over August.

DC3 was successfully planned for September.

This is American, but it talks about the most common times for people to have a birthday:
time.com/4933041/most-popular-common-birthday-september/

It took me an age to get and stay pregnant with my first so didn't care about timings. However, I did delay ttc with my youngest to avoid a July or August birthday. He was due at the end of September (conceived on the first month of trying) but my waters broke on September 1st. I really didn't want to send a just 4yo to school if I could help it. As it was, at just 5 I don't think he was quite ready either so a whole year earlier would have been way too hard for him.

In every class you have someone who will be 4y and few days and someone turning 5 first week. Of course it makes huge difference. I was prem baby born last week August I was always catching up. Even after 2y in college I still wasn’t old enough legal drink at our leaving party.

I’m a teacher and wanted sept/Oct birthdays and managed it both times.
This meant I could finish in July for maternity leave and have baby in sept/Oct (I had bad SPD with both so couldn’t return to work)
I then returned to work at the end of June for a few weeks and got paid for the 6 weeks holiday before work started properly again in September.
Added advantage of my DC being old in the year, I am an August baby myself and really see there is an (Not for everyone, a friend’s August baby is doing amazingly well, but both mine would have struggled to go the year before they did)

To not have to pay for an extra year of preschool childcare

Because you don’t always get that much of a choice? I’m pregnancy with dc3 who took 10 months to conceive. We sure as hell weren’t planning to stop trying to avoid a certain birthday. This baby is due to June, maybe a summer baby, youngest in the year but we are absolutely over the moon

My eldest was due in mid September and she ended up end of August. We didn't plan it for that month (we were TTC but not forward thinking enough to think what month an actual baby would be!! She's just started school this year and she's loving it and it would have been a long old year for her if she'd been in nursery until next year.

If schooling were the reason - this would make nonsense in scotland! Our cutoff is the 28th Feb.

Without meaning to be goady - life exists outside England 😉

I agree with IStandWithPosie. The cut off date for school where I live is the start of July but there are still far more birthdays in September and October than other months, so I don't think it's necessarily school related.

Yes my first was planned for September for the academic advantage.

We were very lucky with no fertility issues.

By the time we had the third child I purposely wanted them before September to avoid an extra year of childcare costs 😂

threekiltsandacardy I'm not in England (or Scotland) either. Our cut off is 30th September so September babies are August baby equivalents here.

Statistically though MN is a UK website, and 84% of the UK population live in England... At least 4 out of 5 MN ers are going to be English. Virtually nobody who isn't outside the UK posts taking all the international MN ers into account on a regular basis... I rather think it's human nature to focus on the majority if you're part of it and the outliers aren't in any specific need of being centered on the topic in question.

I think most people don't time their babies, OP, to be honest.

I needed to have sex a lot more than once and over a time frame of many months to get pregnant. As do a lot of people. It’s not quite as simple as deciding what month you’d like to have a baby in.

I'm in Spain. Children born Jan-Dec 2011 started school in the September of 2014. My son is a December baby and the youngest in his class, he started aged 2.9!

(The first 3 years are optional, they legally started Sept 2017. But everyone goes to school at 2.9+ because it is free and... um... beneficial, obviously!)

I was busy focusing on the fun we had playing bury the sausage to give too much notice to the month he'd be born in. He is nearly 7yo and very happy at school, keeping up with his peers although a little immature. Fluent in 3 languages and can flip between them without a care in the world, jammy bugger!