Circle of Moms

Everyone knows that children develop at different rates.  Some children start talking young, but are late bloomers when it comes to walking.  Others potty train at an early age, but don’t read until much later.  Lots of things factor into this.  Looking through our rich data set, we found something surprising: there are strong regional differences in child development.

Every day, many thousands of parents in the U.S. use Circle of Moms’ Child Space to share their children’s milestones with friends and family. And since Child Space has been widely adopted (more than 10% of the children born in the US in the past three years have a Child Space on Circle of Moms) we can pull some significant inferences from the data all this activity generates.

Northeast babies get chewing early; West Coasters stay on the liquid diet as long as they can

So when do children first eat solid foods?  Turns out there are some large regional variations:

Average Age (in weeks) at which Children First Eat Solid Food

We found these results pretty amazing: moms in the Northeast give their children solid food nearly two weeks — or 10% of the baby’s life — earlier than their peers on the West Coast.  While around 55% of moms in the South, Northeast, and Midwest have given their children solid food by age 18.5 weeks, just 39% of mothers on the Pacific Coast have done the same.

Southern babies knock us out with the way they talk

Next we looked at when a child first uttered a word.  Here there are also large regional variations, though interestingly they seem unrelated to the numbers for solid foods:

Average Age (in weeks) of Child's First Words, by Region

Southern children seem to be early talkers, for reasons unknown to us.  40% of them utter their first word by 7 months, compared to only 25% of Mountain state children.

We wish they all could be Southern babies… and potty train early!

This trend holds — sort of — for potty training:

Average Age (in months) of Children Being Potty Trained

Here we again see Southern children developing most quickly, becoming potty trained more than a month before kids in any other part of the country, while children in Mountain states are later bloomers.  In between, though, we see the order has shifted quite a bit.  Midwesterners talk early and potty train late, while West Coasters talk late and potty train early.  There’s a clever joke there somewhere, but we’re going to resist the temptation and stick to the data!

As you can see, there are some interesting trends we can find by looking at how people are using Child Space.  If you have thoughts on why these trends exist, have seen other interesting research on the topic, or have other ideas for future posts, please let us know in the comments!

If you take a walk on a Saturday morning through San Francisco’s quiet, family-friendly Noe Valley neighborhood where I live, the first thing you’ll notice is the strollers.  American stereotypes of San Francisco generally involve some combination of hippies, hipsters, and gay bars, but Noe Valley is all about the babies.  Walk along 24th Street past the relaxed restaurants serving brunch, the trendy (in a yuppie kind of way) furniture sellers, the coffee shops, and of course the baby stores — and you’ll see the high school classes of 2026, 2027, and 2028 represented in full force.

As I took it in one day, I couldn’t help wonder about the demographics of it all.  Why do I see so many babies in Noe Valley, but so few school-age children and teenagers?

Fortunately, Circle of Moms is an incredibly rich web site and can aid in answering questions like these.  Continue reading ‘Where Have All The (Big) Children Gone?’