That Chinese parents want ‘Dragon’ babies i.e. children to be born if possible in the zodiacal year associated with the Dragon, is an observable fact. Marriages rise in the two years prior to a Dragon year and births increase in these years (this effect is also in evidence elsewhere in Asia).
Writing in a Discussion Paper Series for the Deutsche Post affiliated IZA Institute of Labor Economics researchers Naci H. Mocan and Han Yu wanted to delve deeper and see if this predilection had good reasons?
Do Dragon babies go on to enjoy superior life outcomes or is the preference based on irrational superstition? It’s highly unlikely there’s a genetic superiority associated with children born at any particular time but there might be other reasons why children in a particular cohort go on to better lives. Which, in the case of Dragons, they do.
Dragon babies are more likely to get college educations, they also have consistently higher scores in university entrance exams and middle school Dragons have noticeably higher scores than peers. So what’s going on?
The researchers first take out potential causes such as higher parental and child expectation. They also address the conundrum of why a baby-bulge doesn’t automatically lead to more lifetime competition for this group.
The ‘tell’ comes from an unlikely source; girl’s heights. The average Chinese girl grows up to be around 6cm on average shorter than males of the same age; but Dragon girls manage to cut that difference in half!
Nutrition can be the only reason and the researchers found that Dragon babies generally have more time and money invested in their development by parents (it’s especially telling the height advantage is most noticeable among rural girls).
This ‘attention-advantage’, provoked by the calendar, is the key factor which parents unable to hit the same zodiacal mark could easily replicate, if they cared to. Why they don’t, as social scientists like to say, could be the subject of further useful research.
You can access the paper in full via the following link Dragon-Year effect.
Happy Sunday.