HAPPY&HEALTHY Kids’ health
Worried about how your child measures up? For some kids, being short is perfectly normal, so don’t get stuck on a number.
WHEN BEING SHORT IS NORMAL Take a peek into a preschool class and you’ll see a wide range of heights, but chances are, most children are perfectly within normal range. “When you look at a growth curve, the 50th percentile means if you have 100 kids, 50 kids would be taller than that line and 50 kids would be shorter,” explains Preetha Krishnamoorthy, a paediatric endocrinologist at Montreal Children’s Hospital. According to the World Health Organization growth chart, which has been adapted for Canada, the range between a four-year-old boy at the third percentile and one at the 97th percentile is 16 centimetres (or just over half a foot). If you consider that there will also be a range of ages in a class, some kids are bound to tower over others. For the most part though, how tall your kid will end up is based on genetics. “You don’t expect that a child will be very tall if you have two parents who are not very tall,” says Krishnamoorthy. And although people assume the size of their baby at birth is an indication of what the future holds, it’s unrelated, says Heard, affected by early delivery or many factors that influence growth in utero, including maternal nutrition or maternal stress. That said, when your kid grows into their adult height can vary. Some children have what’s called “constitutional growth delay,” meaning they hit puberty (and experience their accompanying growth spurt) later than their peers. Kids can show signs of being a “late bloomer” even as toddlers, says Heard. “What happens is, the bone-age structure is younger than the chronological age,” she explains. “Even a two-year-old could have a bone age that’s more like a one-year-old.” Though the signs are there if you look for them, doctors don’t normally diagnose this condition
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todaysparent.com Summer 2021
PHOTO: JENNA WAKANI
Small wonders
THEY SAY NO TWO KIDS ARE ALIKE, and that’s especially apparent in Catherine Dollemont’s home in Trent Lakes, Ont. “I have two kids who are off-the-charts tall and a third who’s always been third percentile,” says Dollemont. Their doctor has never been worried about the height of Dollemont’s youngest, who is now five. “They said from the beginning that she was following her own curve, so as long as she didn’t drop lower, they weren’t concerned.” For many parents, though, having a child on the smaller side can be unnerving. “It’s a very common concern that parents have, especially if their family is on the taller side,” says Janice Heard, a Calgary paediatrician and a member of the Canadian Paediatric Society’s Public Education Advisory Committee. While being on the shorter side is usually nothing to worry about, it can sometimes be a sign of an underlying problem, so it’s always worth getting checked out.
