Debunking Old Wives Tales and Advice About Pregnancy and Parenting

Every newly pregnant and new mom should be given a warning when they announce their pregnancy and bring their newborn babies home from the hospital: You will get so much unsolicited advice from moms and grandmas you won't know what to do with it all! How do you know if it is true or not? There are so many old wives tales out there that it is hard to tell fact from fiction.

When I was pregnant with my second child, I reached up in a cabinet to get something out of it. "Stop," yelled one of my co-workers. "You'll hurt the baby!" "Hurt the baby?" I asked. "If you raise your arms over your head, the umbilical cord could strangle the baby." False. Think about it: Basically, this old wives tale says that the position of your arms has to do with the position of the umbilical cord. Is that physically possible? Can you REALLY control where the umbilical cord goes by moving your arms? Not unless your name is Merlin!

Determining the sex of the baby is a hot commodity. Everyone wants to guess the sex of the baby. Before we found out the sex of each of our children, there was a lot of speculation as to what the sex of the baby was. One person told me, "You can tell what the baby's sex is by their heart rate." This is a popular myth. Many women still believe this to be true in determining the sex of the baby. It is very untrue. I found out the sex of each of my babies while I was pregnant, and the heart rate did not coincide with the sex. The myth is that if a baby's heart rate is under 140, it is a boy, and if it is above 170, it is a girl. My daughter's heart rate was under 140 many a time. Both of my son's heart rates were above 170 many a time. My OB confirmed that this is solely a myth, and he went to school for eight years, so I pretty much trust him! Apparently, a study done in 1993 at the University of Kentucky *could* predict the sex of 91% of male fetuses and 74% of female fetuses. Granted, this is the ONLY study that ever determined that, and pretty much any study done after that concluded the complete opposite-that gender can NOT be predicted by monitoring the baby's heart rate.