Secret to your child’s growth spurts? They are fed too well, say researchers

Better health and improved diets are behind a phenomenon of growth spurts in children
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Growth spurts in children are a modern phenomenon resulting from better health and improved diets, researchers claimed today.

Children can typically gain an extra 5cm to 7cm a year in height — to the frustration of parents who find themselves having to buy two school uniforms a year.

Now research from the London School of Economics suggests that such spurts were unheard of a century ago, contradicting the belief that they are a fundamental part of growing up.

Dr Eric Schneider, an economic historian at LSE, said this was probably due to improvements in water sanitation and food hygiene and the eradication of chronic respiratory diseases in childhood that resulted in “sickly” children.

He told the Standard: “All the improvements in health we have seen over the last 100 years have completely changed the way children grow.

“Growth spurts are great in general, though perhaps not for the parents who have to buy two uniforms in a year. People experience them today because they’re healthier, they have less chronic disease burden and in some ways their nutrition is better.”

Dr Schneider’s research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, looked at growth data on British boys from 1865 to 1995. The older data was gathered on thousands of boys who lived aboard the training ships Indefatigable, in Liverpool, and the Exmouth, in London.

He found that the average child born before 1910 did not experience a sudden increase in height around puberty. By contrast, today’s children grew more quickly, matured more rapidly and reached greater heights — about 11cm taller than those of the same age a century ago. The most rapid spurts were recorded between the World Wars.

Dr Schneider said: “I spent a huge amount of time going over every single thing that could explain the fact that we don’t see a pubertal growth spurt [before 1910]… The reality is that there may have been a little bit of a pubertal growth spurt but it wasn’t as pronounced as we see today.”

He said common ailments such as diarrhoea could play a major part in affecting a child’s growth in the late 19th century. Nutritional improvement in Britain came in the second half of that century, but changes to growth did not occur until later. He believes this suggests growth spurts have more to do with chronic diseases that make children sick.

His study could give an insight into tackling the modern-day stunting crisis in children in the developing world.

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