Parents can monitor the development of their children by continuously measuring their child's height and weight. With a wide variety of parameters of a child's development, weight and height are simple enough to measure and at the same time sufficiently informative to determine the presence of certain problems and diseases.
The concept of the norm in itself is relative, therefore, speaking of the norm for height or weight, it is necessary to take into account many factors:
- factors of heredity;
- type of feeding for babies;
- the presence or absence of individual characteristics of the state of health, and so on.
The first thing you should pay attention to when determining the norm of physical development is a uniform and proportional increase in height and weight. It should be borne in mind that there are two periods of a child's life when there is a sharp jump in growth: infant (in the first 12 months, the child's growth can increase by 25 … 30 centimeters) and puberty, during which the increase in height can be about 20 … 30 cm.
To determine the rate of growth and weight, there are a large number of special anthropometric tables and formulas, which are based on statistical data for a certain amount of time.
Growth formulas
- for children under six months, the growth rate can be determined by the formula: 66 cm minus 2.5 cm for each month up to six months;
- at 6 months, the growth of a child can be determined as follows: add 1, 5 cm to 66 cm for each month after six months;
- up to four years, the formula is as follows: 100-8 * (4 - age in years);
- after 4 years, you can use the formula: 100 + 68 * (age in years - 4).
Centile tables
The World Health Organization has developed special tables that contain statistics on the main parameters of development, such as height, weight and head circumference of a child. In these tables, the vertical groups make up age bands, or "centiles". All data are conventionally divided into seven intervals, reflecting the norm and deviations from it:
- Normal indicators are parameters located in the groups "average", "below average" and "above average";
- when the measurements fall into the "low" and "high" groups, it should be understood that these characteristics of physical data are characteristic of a smaller part of children and can be attributed to the individual characteristics of the child, not associated with any health problems;
- the child's data, falling into the extreme groups "very low" and "very high", indicate possible problems and the need to seek advice from specialists.
