Being short does not mean that your child has a health problem. A short child is defined as any child whose height is less than the 3rd percentile for his or her cohort. A quick check with your doctor will let you know if your child's growth and height are acceptable.
Constitutional delay in growth and puberty (A child is short during most of childhood but will have late onset of puberty and end up in the typical height range as an adult because the child will have more time to grow.)
Treatment for Growth Hormone Deficiency
If it's determined that growth hormone deficiency is the cause of a child's short stature than the child can be treated with growth hormone therapy, which is given by injections 6-7 days a week. A big misconception is that growth hormones can make any child taller.
Taking care of himself — eating well, exercising regularly, and getting plenty of rest — is the best way for your son to help his body reach its natural potential. No pill, formula, or nutritional supplement can increase someone's height. Mostly, our genes determine how tall we will be.
Causes of faltering growth
Postnatal factors, such as nutritional or environmental problems, endocrinopathy or chronic disease may affect growth. In toddlers, growth failure is often the result of inadequate caloric intake but may also be the first sign of disease in an otherwise asymptomatic child.
“They eventually catch up and reach a normal adult height. They're the kid that goes away over the summer of grade 11 and comes back a foot taller," says Heard.
Tall parents have short children because the traits are controlled by alleles of a particular gene. Alleles are variant forms of a gene present on homologous chromosomes and the parents are heterozygous for the height phenotype.
Growth problems can be caused by a number of factors, including genetics, hormonal disorders, systemic illnesses, and poor absorption of food. Causes of growth problems usually fall into the following categories: familial short stature, a tendency to follow the family's inherited short stature (shortness)
Doubling a child's height at age 2 can provide an estimate of how tall that child will be in adulthood. (Boys are usually a little taller than that number and girls a little shorter.) That's because by 2 most children have reached the growth chart percentile they will stay on as they grow.
Slow growth occurs when a child is not growing at the average rate for their age. The delay may be due to an underlying health condition, such as growth hormone deficiency. Some growth problems are genetic. Others are caused by a hormonal disorder or the inadequate absorption of food.
If you are a man with average height, you can expect your son to be a few inches (centimeters) taller than you. This is because the regression line and the SD line both coincide at the average heights. For instance, a father with an average height of 67.7 inches (172cm) will have a 68.7-inch-tall (175cm-tall) son.
However, several formulas can provide a reasonable guess for child growth. Here's a popular example: Add the mother's height to the father's height in either inches or centimeters. Add 5 inches (13 centimeters) for boys or subtract 5 inches (13 centimeters) for girls.
Scientists estimate that about 80 percent of an individual's height is determined by the DNA sequence variations they have inherited, but which genes these changes are in and what they do to affect height are only partially understood.
Being very short doesn't necessarily mean that your child has a health problem. He may have inherited his diminutive stature from one of his parents, or he may just be a late bloomer who will shoot up to a more average height at puberty, which may come later for him than for the average child.
If a mother and father are the same height, their daughters will be roughly the same height, but their sons will be taller. This is because in order for the mother to be the same height as her husband, she must have more of the other 'tall genes' than him, and these get passed onto her sons.
The height a person reaches by adulthood can depend on the genes they inherit from their biological parents, although some factors may mean a child does not reach their full potential height. Nutrition and overall health during childhood and adolescence also affect human growth and height.
All men inherit a Y chromosome from their father, which means all traits that are only found on the Y chromosome come from dad, not mom. The Supporting Evidence: Y-linked traits follow a clear paternal lineage.
If it's found that your child is growing or developing too slowly, the doctor may order tests to check for medical conditions such as hypothyroidism, growth hormone deficiency, or other things that can affect growth. If you have any concerns about your child's growth or development, talk with your doctor.
Boys tend to show the first physical changes of puberty between the ages of 10 and 16. They tend to grow most quickly between ages 12 and 15. The growth spurt of boys is, on average, about 2 years later than that of girls. By age 16, most boys have stopped growing, but their muscles will continue to develop.
Chances are you'll be around the same height as your parents. If one parent is tall and one short, then you're likely to end up somewhere in between. But you could be taller or shorter, too. Boy, there are a lot of "buts" when it comes to height!
This is about ~2.7 inches. The average phenotypic difference between siblings was about 7.2 centimeters (D). Therefore, to a first approximation the recapitulation of population-wide variation in a continuous quantitative trait within sibling cohorts seems to hold.
While your final height is dictated chiefly by the genes you inherit from your parents, factors like nutrition and disease account for around 20 per cent of the height variation between people. The factors' effect varies from country to country.