Mrs Bennet may have lamented having five daughters and no son in Pride and Prejudice, but it appears that Lizzy and her sisters would be unlikely to produce a similar set of children: research suggests having multiple offspring of the same sex does not run in the family. In the largest study of its kind, researchers have found that whether a family is dominated by boys or girls — or has an equal mix — is simply down to chance. The team say the new findings scotch — at least for humans — a long-held theory that the sex-ratio of offspring is not random and that biases are heritable. But, he added, the idea had problems. Writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B , an international team of researchers report how they scrutinised records for all people born in Sweden in or later and had at least one child before Overall, the study included more than 6. The team then carried out an analysis to explore whether first cousins tended to be of the same sex. The results reveal that there is no such link — a result that held even when the team looked only at first-born children. However, looking within a nuclear family of parents and children, the team found that families with just two children tended to have a boy and a girl — a split that occurred more often than expected by chance — while families with more children tended to have a skew towards either boys or girls.
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The media is full of confusing messages about sex — it can seem like everyone is doing it all the time. Talking with their parents helps young people to feel safer and less anxious, allowing them to make up their own minds about the choices they take. It also gives them the confidence to talk to future partners about their relationship, sex and contraception.
Contraception and safer sex
This week, a woman navigates an open marriage, turns down sex with a married man, and fights with her movie producer husband: 38, married, Downtown Brooklyn. My daughter wakes up and crawls in with me on the couch. My husband is in our bedroom. We had a fight last night. My daughter is only three so she thinks nothing of this. Pre-school drop-off is over and I hop on the subway to work. I love these few early hours at work. I sit at my computer and get shit done. I also use these morning hours to think quietly.
There are lots of stereotypes about the eldest child, youngest child and middle child, but are any true? Freddy decided to carry his own baby, but he faced a highly unusual challenge — he's a gay transgender man. Despite vast changes in male and female roles in Western societies - is it still unusual to have a male nanny? You need to enable JavaScript to run this app. Raising a child with no gender. The parents keeping the sex of their baby a secret. Kati Pohler was abandoned in a market when she was three days old. The incredible story of how two neighbours discovered a shared past.
