An Old Wives Tale That’s True?

Heartburn makes many a pregnant woman miserable. And if you moan about it, people tell you that it means that your baby will have lots of hair. Because that’s totally going to make you feel better when your throat and stomach are burning up.

OK, babies with lots of hair are something to ooh and ahh over, all that beautiful fine, soft baby hair. (But bald babies are really cute too.)

A group of skeptical scientists researched a group of pregnant women, expecting to debunk the old wives tale that heartburn=newborn hair. Turns out that almost all women who had moderate or severe heartburn while pregnant gave birth to babies with above-average amounts of hair. And, the majority of women who didn’t suffer from heartburn had bald babies or babies with below-average amounts of hair.

How weird is that? Many old wives tales are absolute nonsense, but many do have a ring of truth, and this is one that I would never have believed could be true at all.

My son fits with what the scientists say: I don’t remember having heartburn when I was pregnant. My son was born with just a tiny amount of blond fuzz. That’s mom-speak for bald. But hey, it grew. He’s two with hockey hair now.

How about you? Did you have heartburn, and then did your baby have lots of hair?

And if you are pregnant, and clutching a bottle of antacid as you read this, does the prospect of a baby with lots of hair make you feel any better?

My daughter was born with a full head of black hair. I was a bald baby and my husband was born with hair covering his entire body, so I think we got a happy medium with our daughter. To this day I can picture the adorable swirl her hair did on the back of her head, and I can’t see a newborn baby’s hair swirl without thinking back on my daughter when she was a newborn.

Although plenty of parents have told me that their baby’s hair fell out after birth, my daughter retained all her hair and promptly got to work growing more. Most people who met my daughter commented on her impressive head of hair, and I probably could have started putting barretts in her hair right away if I wasn’t terrified that she would have plucked them out and choked on them. So I let her hair go wild, and it spiked up on the top of her head as though she was electrified.

Basically, she looked like a really cute Fraggle. It was awesome.

There was only one day during the newborn stage when I really tried to tame her hair into something a little more girly. My husband was about to graduate from college, so I had made an appointment to get a portrait done of our daughter holding the tassel from his graduation cap. I was really sneaky about it; he had no idea I intended the photo to be his graduation gift.

Wouldn’t you know it…after I had spent the morning wetting down her hair and getting it “just so,” my husband arrives home from work because he forgot something. He walks right up to her and – of course – tousles her hair in an affectionate gesture. So much for the perfect hairdo for the portrait.

The portrait will live in infamy: There’s my daughter, cute as can be, grasping a tassel and proudly displaying her Fraggle hair. It’s one of my favorite pictures.