General Rule of Thumb

swspear · December 2013

(I keep meaning to post this but have repeatedly forgotten until now!) During my pregnancy, my doctor said that a general rule of thumb in the medical world is that the weight of a woman's baby at delivery is about her shoe size. So with that in mind, most women are size 7 and 8 shoes and that's why most babies are 7 or 8 pounds.

Obviously it won't be true for everyone but it's definitely an interesting estimation. You can imagine my horror when I heard this and thought of my size 10 feet. And what's worse is that during pregnancy, my feet grew to where I had to buy size 11 shoes (though I'm back in my regular 10s now). Well, guess how big our baby boy was? 10 pounds 15 ounces!

Just thought I'd pass this along and see whether its been true for others as well.

Soap1 · December 2013

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16809661

shaunessa · December 2013

Glad that's not true!!! I wear a size 5 1/2 and I'd hate for my baby boy to be that tiny!

swspear · December 2013

Well, good to know! Clearly I didn't think it was a scientific fact. I mean do men's shoe size really correspond to their penis size? No! I file it more under "old wives tales." It just happens that for my friends, this rule of thumb was spot on for all of us so I wasn't sure if it had any merit for other women as well.

mcgeeva · December 2013

yeah not true. I wear a 8.5-9 and my son was born at 6pds 9oz

Soap1 · December 2013

swspear said:

Well, good to know! Clearly I didn't think it was a scientific fact. I mean do men's shoe size really correspond to their penis size? No! I file it more under "old wives tales." It just happens that for my friends, this rule of thumb was spot on for all of us so I wasn't sure if it had any merit for other women as well.

Actually, this one is more like, "Possibly..."

https://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/explainer/2013/02/chubby_checker_lawsuit_does_shoe_size_correlate_with_penis_size.html