It can happen sooner than you think: your tiny little newborn daughter suddenly wears the same size as you do! When will her growth slow down? There is one milestone that may indicate that she’s about to reach her final height.
“Puberty is really the deciding factor when it comes to growth,” says Dr. Vaneeta Bamba, pediatric endocrinologist and medical director of the Growth Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Because girls hit puberty sooner than boys, they often reach their full height before boys do. Boys can still gain inches in their late teens.
“Girls and boys do go through puberty slightly differently. Girls will start puberty a little bit earlier, around 11 or so, and then many of them are often finished growing by the time they’re 14,” Bamba says.
For girls, the onset of menstruation will often signal the end of growth. “With girls, once they get their period, they’ve achieved most of their growth, but they will typically grow another one to two inches even after their period, generally speaking,” says Bamba.
There are no definitive rules when it comes to growth, however. Some children may hit a growth streak earlier in puberty while others are “late bloomers.” Though growth is not always “straightforward,” Bamba says there are a few indicators we can use as guideposts.
How Can You Predict Your Daughter’s Height?
There are a handful of calculations you can use to “predict” a child’s height, but they aren’t always accurate.
Dr. Marisa Censani, pediatric endocrinologist at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian, says that specialists can use a bone age assessment to evaluate skeletal maturity.
“A bone age assessment is an X-ray image of the left hand and wrist that is used in growth evaluations to check a child’s growth plates and assess growth potential,” explains Censani. “It can be used to predict future growth and to provide insight into the pubertal development of the child.”
There’s also a low tech option.
You can take the height of a 2-year-old and double it to see what their height will be as an adult. Or for females, you can take the father’s height, subtract five inches and average the measurement with the mother’s height to find the genetic target. But a substantial height gap between the parents will increase the probability of error.
Bamba, for example, is 12 inches shorter than her husband. The couple has two daughters and one is “incredibly tall” while the other is “average” height.
“It kind of just depends on the genes that you get,” Bamba says.
Should You Be Concerned About Your Daughter’s Height?
There are two ways to look at height — as a static measurement at any point in time or as “height velocity,” aka how fast you’re growing.
“You can be low on a growth curve, but have a normal height velocity because you’re growing at a good rate, or you could even have a normal height, but it’s abnormal because you’re not growing as fast as you would expect,” says Bamba.
Factors like nutrition, neonatal history and previous illnesses can affect height at a given point in time, but they make not make a difference in the overall growth trajectory.
Both metrics are important in different ways, but Bamba says that someone with a “consistent growth velocity is less worrisome than somebody who was crossing percentiles upwards or downwards during childhood.”
As a general rule of thumb, children who have not started puberty grow about 2 inches per year, Censani says. “As a child enters into puberty, this growth increases to 2 to 3 inches per year at the start of puberty, with 3 to 4 inches growth per year during a child’s peak growth velocity.”
Censani urges parents who are concerned about their child’s growth to consult their pediatrician, who might run additional tests or recommend seeing a pediatric endocrinologist. Chronic medical conditions like iron-deficiency anemia, celiac disease, hypothyroidism or growth hormone deficiency may be the cause of slow growth.
“The best predictor of whether a child is growing well or not is really if they’re growing consistently,” Bamba explains.
“If they’re growing consistently, there’s probably not a hormone abnormality because you have to have something that’s propelling that. But if children are not growing consistently, I think that’s really where we get concerned.”
