Growth Charts

Hands down, the most fun part of the well-child exams with kiddos is checking out the growth charts. Most often families will come in concerned that their kiddo doesn’t eat anything and grandma always says he is so skinny and gives you a hard time for not force-feeding him like a stuffed goose. Where 99% of the time, the child knows exactly how much their body wants/needs for food and continues to grow perfectly on their trend line.

 So what are trend lines on growth charts?

You will often have pediatricians describe what percentile a child is in on their growth curve. Let’s say a child is on the 30th percentile trend line. This means that little Johnny weighs more than 30 out of 100 healthy kids.  Does that mean he is healthier than those 30 kids who weigh less? Or those 70 other kiddos that weigh more, are they healthier? Nope. All those trend lines come from data that researchers have put together from kids all over the world who are healthy. What we care about the most is that kids’ bodies choose a trend line and sort of stick to it so we can make pretty educated guesstimates about calorie needs, and how many pounds and inches they will grow before the next well visit.

Even though pediatricians don’t say it, they are also checking with the trend lines and scoping out mom and dad to see that those kiddos sort of represent an average (either weighted a bit towards mom or dad depending on the kiddos sex/genetic parents of the child). If I have 2 parents who are 5 feet, but the kiddo is on a trend line saying they are going to be 7 feet 6 inches, then this could prompt me to be on the lookout for some endocrine and growth disorders. And vice versa. If I have 2 parents who start for basketball teams, but we have a kiddo trending more like a horse jockey. We will be monitoring for possible growth delays.