How The Super Blue Blood Moon Will Affect Your Kids Is So Disappointing

After two supermoons in the last two months and the eclipse last summer, January 31 is bringing another rare celestial event, the Super Blue Blood Moon. This phenomenon combines the blue moon (the second full moon of the month), another supermoon (the moon at one of the closest points to Earth in its orbit) with a lunar eclipse. We haven't seen this epic trilogy happen on the same night since 1866. Many people feel that human emotions and behavior are tied to the cycles of the moon, so you might wonder how the blue moon will affect your kids this time around.

Turns out, your kids' behavior most likely shouldn't really be affected by the super blue blood moon trifecta. Since there are three simultaneous phenomenon, let's unpack them each separately. The first one we can examine is the blue moon. Despite the expression, "one in a blue moon" making it sound extremely rare, it actually happens more than you might think. It also isn't really blue. Blue moons occur approximately every 2.7 years, according to Space.com. From a scientific standpoint, this extra moon is no more likely to cause your child to behave differently than any other full moon, as several studies have been conducted that analyzed arrests and homicidal and suicidal behavior around the full moon and found that there was no connection to be found.

Which brings us to the supermoon and the possibility of it making your kiddies a little crazier than usual. A super moon is a type of full moon that orbits closer to the earth than usual. When you look in the sky, it appears larger than it typically looks, and brighter as well. This could affect the tides a little and in theory, the extra brightness could make it harder for your child to sleep, but that would require their bedroom to have a window that faced the moon and that had no shades. Even if it affected their sleep, a study at the Eastern Ontario Children's Hospital Research Institute showed that a full moon only affected sleep duration by about one percent, or five minutes a night. This isn't enough sleep deprivation to really see a difference in their behavior.

So could a lunar eclipse be a behavioral culprit and give you something to look out for that night? A lunar eclipse occurs when the moon passes directly behind the Earth and into its shadow, according to The Mind Unleashed. Their site says that the lunar eclipse can only happen during a full moon so that everything is lined up perfectly. The red color that appears on the edges of the moon is the sunlight that has been refracted from the Earth's atmosphere, causing people to refer to it as a "blood moon." There is no evidence that a lunar eclipse causes changes in mood or behavior, though if you wake your child up in the middle of the night to watch the eclipse, which is a fabulous experience for them, there's a good chance they will be more tired than usual the next day. And yes, this would naturally lead to a change in their behavior — how chipper are you the next day if you've stayed or spent a good amount of time in the middle of the night awake? But that's not really a direct correlation to the physical effects of the eclipse, it's more based on the social effects.

Being that these three things, the supermoon, the blue moon, and the lunar eclipse are so rare that they haven't been seen together in over 150 years, there's a good chance there won't be another one in our lifetime. Which might make it worth it to drag the kids out of bed that night and take the behavioral consequences the next day.

Check out Romper's new video series, Romper's Doula Diaries:

Watch full episodes of Romper's Doula Diaries on Facebook Watch.