Yay for Jeanne Sager, who has written a fascinating essay for Babble on a subject I have long wondered about: Those percentile charts that are constantly mentioned each time we take our kids to the pediatrician.
Sager's piece notes the anxiety many parents feel when their babies rank on the low end of the spectrum for weight. She even mentions one case in which a mother was told her baby's lack of pounds represented a "failure to thrive."
I understand the percentile insecurity complex firsthand. My son, at 15 months, has yet to hit double percentile digits for weight. He looks healthy, he eats well and he is a happy kid. Yet there he sits, in the seventh percentile. Every time I come home from the pediatrician, I wonder: Is he ranking on the tiny side simply because most American kids are too big?
Sager's story says, actually, that might be right: "According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the fatal flaw of the
percentiles used by most U.S. pediatricians to chart growth is this:
they compare children to other American children, and other American
children are, well, big. Thanks to the U.S. obesity crisis, many of
them are in fact way too big. And that leads some parents of smallish
children to look at the charts and believe their kids are
undernourished."
The story goes on to mention WHO's recommendation of using a fixed standard of healthiness to judge our children, rather than simply comparing them to each other. I gotta say, that makes a lot of sense to me.
But what do you think? Have you ever developed a percentile insecurity complex because of your child's weight? How did you overcome it? And was your pediatrician helpful or harmful in helping handle shrimpy kid syndrome?
Photo: Melissa Drenzel/Babble.com
