The Truth Is, All Kids Are Accidents

If your family seems to produce nothing but girls or nothing but boys, your genes actually have very little to do with it.  The experts say it happens purely by chance.

My family seems to be overrun with girls. I have one sister, and on my Dad's side of the family, I have nothing but female cousins. On my Mom's side of the family, I've got two female cousins and a lone male cousin. Poor cousin Bill! He had so much pressure to represent all of male-kind among all of us girls growing up. And my poor Dad, surviving and thriving in a family with so much estrogen. Does DNA produce these gender-dominant families, or is it a random coincidence?

Research says having several children of the same gender does not run in the family.  Surprised?  Whether we have all boys, all girls, or an equal mix, they're telling us it all happens by chance.  Sometimes the researchers look at a small sample to come up with these things, but this time the sampling was huge.  It involved families living between 1932 and 2014, and a total of 6.7 million people.  If we disagree, we can't blame the sample size.

But check this out.  They also discovered that families with two kids tended to have a boy and a girl.  That was "a split that occurred more often than expected by chance."  And they also said families with more children "tended to have a skew towards either boys or girls."  So the more of one thing you have, the more of that thing you're gonna get.

I was certain that every one of my kids was going to be a boy.  When the first one turned out to be a girl, I thought surely the next one would be a boy because the universe tended to mix these things up, and also, I wanted to have a left-handed Major League Baseball pitcher.  The second child was another girl.  And then another girl after that.  And now I can't imagine it any other way!  These three girls are the best things that have ever happened to me and I love them to the moon and back.  Whatever randomness produced them, is just fine with me.

The "sex ratio," as they call it, works in wasps, but it doesn't work in humans.  If one wasp family has a lot of girls in it, those wasps will continue to produce girls, although there must be a male wasp in that nest somewhere.

Since the human sex ratio depends completely upon chance, you know what this means, right?  Those of us with lopsided families are about to experience a huge explosion of the opposite gender to balance it all out.

Here come the boys!  And surely one of them will play pro baseball, and I'll be watching that left-handed Major League Baseball pitcher from the stands as a granny.  Unless that's random too.