Where have all these giant children come from?

[CredulousThickos]

And by children I mainly mean young teens.

I am a short arse at five foot two and a half. But growing up I was about average among my peers, with maybe one or two who were 'tall', which would still be under six foot.

My teens are 13 and 15 and roughly my height. The vast majority of their mates are MASSIVE. Two of DD's friends are over six foot, the rest shorter but still much taller than DD, and all but one of DS's circle are. He is actually the shortest kid in his year.

My much younger brother is 6'4 (he's 23), whereas all three of us sisters (early to late 30s) are my height or shorter. Same parents, btw, so not that.

Is this just confirmation bias or are the next generation taller in general?

I was used to being on the lower side of average but now I feel like a proper short arse.

Is it me or has anyone else noticed this epidemic of height?

I think it's a combo of genetics and diet. Myself and my husband are both on the tall side of average. Since before I became pregnant with my first, due to complex health issues, I started to be very careful with my diet. All organic, tonnes of veg, low on wheat and dairy. All meat that we eat is free range and organic - which means we don't eat loads as it's so expensive! Everything is cooked from scratch, aside from the odd meal out. My kids are massive - very tall and and all of them gain muscle at an astonishing rate. I don't gain muscle tone well at all, but I had a crap diet as a child. We have very close friends and family from the Netherlands, where everyone seems to be huge, but as far as I've seen the diet seems to consist of meat/wheat/dairy and beer. I know that's generalising, of course, but I've observed it so often now and haven't seen a variation in that. So I think that animal products surely play a part, but if you get lots of veg and good fats, then that can also make a difference. I have a few friends who can't get their kids to eat much, and their kids shoe sizes are 3-4 sizes behind my kids of the same age and they're always sick. I have a neighbour with identical twins, she's always saying that the little skinny one hardly eats "eats like a bird". So one is about 2 inches taller than the other, and has bigger feet, despite being identical. They're only 7 and yet the difference in diet has already started to show itself.

If only! If we were a nation of giants I might have a pair of trousers to my name...

I'm 5 10 but need a 35" trouser length. The best out there on the high st is 33" or less. Long Tall Sally excepted but their trousers are just the wrong shape for me and don't fit!

Hardly eating anything doesn't mean they'll be smaller and more sick.
I was a "eat like a bird", lunch for me was one digestive biscuit on a good day, and dsis was "eats like a horse"- she'd eat 3 large cheese rolls at least.
I am 3" taller, and missed no school in my last 7 years due to illness, whereas she had regular colds and sickness bugs.

It's not uncommon for there to be a difference in size of identical twins.

@elphame Next go up to a 36"

My friend has a 13 year old who is already 6ft 2!
My toddler is one of those bigger ones too.. he can easily pass for a 5 year old. But it's swings and roundabouts, he was slow to speak and is only just speaking in sentences at 3.5. Which meant he looked like a babbling schoolchild for a while

I've been researching my family tree and have both my maternal and paternal grandfather's service records from around the time of the first world war.

One was 5'3" and the other was 5'3 3/4".
I couldn't believe how short they were, I'm taller than them at 5'5"

My DS is 6'2" , we are definitely getting bigger.

My parents were both short, DF was only 5.4" and DM 4.11", so no wonder I am only 4.11". DH on the other hand is 6.0" and his parents and siblings are all tall.

DTS1 is already 5.3" and DTS2 is 5.1... they are 9! They are both the tallest in their class and taller than me (which isn't hard though).

I don't really understand how this happened, other than to say that I was expecting them to be somewhere in the middle but it would seem they have none of my height genes at all! Coincidentally I have two cousins who are on the short side who both married tall men and their respective children are very tall too.

I'm under 5 foot, my husband over 6 foot. I do want my daughter to break the 5 foot barrier.

My sister is an inch taller than me. All the rest of our family are average to tall. Me and my sister must to throw backs.

Whenever people bang on about vanity sizing and say 'an 8 used to be an 8' I wonder if they actually look at teens these days.

Yes, some are overweight but as a group they're also much bigger generally. Their height, their frames, their shoe sizes. Of course they can't fit into dresses from the 1950s.

My DD recently went on holiday with some mates and as they walked from the car I was really struck by their size. All tall, lean, athletic. They looked like an international netball team going off to the sun.

It's the shoe sizes that get me. I know my feet are stupidly small, but it galls me that I can get my feet into my friend's 7 yo's size 1 sandals, and he isn't the anomalous one. Half my brownies are around my size or bigger. I remember my school friend complaining about her comparatively huge size 3 feet in y6 25 years ago.

At 5ft 2 I consider myself averagely short as in not denying that I'm obviously short, but its a perfectly normal short height. Part way through the school year, the y7s tend to stand near me and do a certain wiggle that preceeds the triumphant exclamation that the are now taller than Mrs Idiosyncratic. I physically blend in easily with a bunch of 11-12 year olds (awkward when a colleague comes in and totally fails to notice me...)

The females in my family have loitered around 5ft 1-2 (before shrinkage sets in... ) and I wonder if nutrition is a factor in our stagnation. DGGM (5ft 1) was born pre-war and was an appalling cook rationing or not which will have affected DGM's (5ft 2) childhood nutrition. She struggled financially in her early adult years which will have affected DM's (5ft 1) diet. DM was young when she had me which can be a factor in small babies, (born 6lb 7, now 5ft 2). I've had a sufficient diet in terms of range and quantity so am probably the first generation with a diet in the optimum range. Another factor is that we've all had digestive issues and are prone to conditions like IBS and possibly intolerances.

DS1 interests me from a nutritional point of view. He weighed over 2lb more than my birthweight at birth (oh lucky me...). He was a long lean baby. DH is 6ft, so DS has a large range of genetic potential available for his height. He went straight into 0-3 clothes for length and grew happily. I remember buying a lovely stock of 9-12 month clothes ready to grow in to... but he stalled, and the clothes ended being off season. He grew slowly for a couple of years and ended up looking rather small against his peers at 3. This coincides with his food allergies. He was breastfed so his CMPA wasn't activated until we started weaning at 6 months around the age that his growth stagnated. He was on an exclusion diet for milk, eggs and soya from 12 months until around 3. He has since caught up, and it is since his diet normalised and got a full range of fats and proteins. In contrast DS2 started off marginally smaller then began his mission to catch up with his big brother getting quite close at times although this has now widened since DS1 has had a catch up mission and both are middling against their peers.

The point about maternal health/ mortality is interesting. My great aunt died at birth after getting stuck in an incredibly long labour that would never be permitted in the NHS. Only a CS would have got her out safely as she was just too big for my Great Grandmother who came close to dying from exhaustion. This strikes a chord with me as DS1 had a large head that got quite firmly stuck in back to back and after 2 hours of pushing was delivered by EMCS. There must have been a lot of larger babies that didn't survive birth that could have with modern medical provision.

I'm 5'4 and I often feel a lot taller than other women around me. I'm certainly the tallest female in my immediate family (Nan, mum etc). I'm just about to hit early twenties.

I have always felt tall Where are all these tall women/young people you speak of? I need them around to make me feel small and delicate

Oh and DH is a vegan and 6'3 No dairy consumption for him and never had any meat as a child to encourage these extra growth hormones people speak of.

I'm wondering how tall in utero DS will be since I'm 5'4. Although for some reason have been measured as 5'3 this pregnancy

I am 5'8 and DH is 5'10. DS1 is 16 and 6'2", whilst 14 yr old DS2 is 6'1".

There are no giants on DH's side, but my DM had some very tall aunts (5'10 was v tall for women born in the late 1800s) and male cousins who were 6'6 and over, so maybe my boys get their genes from there.

Better nutrition certainly plays a part in it. DH and BIL are Filipino but grew up here, at 5'10ish they are average here but very tall back home.

DS I think is going to be very tall too, we are having to get him a toddler bed (he's 16m) because he's only got about 5-10cm left of room in his cot (travel cot so a bit shorter than normal)

My dd is a hair under 6 foot 2, my ds is 6 foot, Dh and I are both about 5 foot ten, and we are taller than our own parents too.
Yep, they are getting taller!
Lots of vegetables, protien and exercise in the fresh air has something to do with it, I think

I've always wondered about the size of doors = humans were smaller argument. We don't look at the enormous doorways on castles and conclude that medieval Europeans were giants . In fact the size of doorways were more a reflection of the social status of the people permitted to use them. If you look at medieval paintings and prints humans are always depicted as larger than the livestock. Not because they were giants or the cows were titchy, but because size was used to denote hierarchy rather than reality. That continued well past medieval times, richer dwellings have larger and grander doorways. Little rural cottages of the poor had tiny doorways. They were probably cheaper as well.

It's definitely nutrition - specifically more meat and dairy. I'm 5'11" and at the very middle-class school I went to, I was one of a number of similarly tall girls.

I lived near a school where the parents would have been significantly poorer and the girls there were noticeably shorter than the girls at my school.

Both my cousins tower over their parents, which I'm convinced is the massive amount of milk they sank when they were kids. I'm 43, btw, so this is not a recent thing.

We're bucking the trend! DD will most likely be shorter than me, I am 5'5, mum is 5'9 and gran was 5'11.

linoleum I said the town I am thinking of has some posher houses that have low doorways.
And lower houses would be cheaper but a lower doorway? Surely wood would be cheaper/easier to handle than stone? Bigger than needed to show off I get but would you build smaller than you needed to show that you were inferior?
And a lot of interior castle doorways are small - the main doors needed to be big enough to let knights on horseback through...

I was prem and they said I would be small. I'm 5ft 10
My cousins (male) are 6ft3 and 6ft1, mum is 5ft 8 ish and dad 6ft 1. Plus my uncle was a boxer and grandad a wrestler so I was never likely to be a 5ft 2 ballet dancer build

The thing you have to beware of with very old buildings is that the doorways can appear lower because the ground level rises over the years. I went to see an exhibition about Jane Austen in the summer and they had one of her pelisse

s on display. (Sorry, touchscreen misbehaving.) It showed that she was about 5 foot 6 and a modern size 4-6. Slight by modern standards, but not exactly short. (A pelisse is a kind of floor-length indoor jacket/overcoat, worn like a hoodie or cardi today.)

Our parents determine our height. It's been determined that malnourishment in one generation can impact the following generations.

So, aside from genes, the biggest factor is greater access to more food.

I was born in 1968. I'm speaking for my generation.

Our parents were born just as rationing finished, they were brought up just as the fast/convenience food revolution began.

They started having children when fridge freezers were a luxury item and food had to be bought fresh every day.

As the cost of living came down in relative terms, fridges started to become essential items, food became more plentiful and demand for greater variety grew.

We were brought up during a time when food for us was plentiful but we were affected by our parents and their 'stunting' for want of a better word.

We benefited from better nutrition and children born to us benefited also.

They grew surrounded by food and their genes benefited as a result.

Their children, our grandkiddies, great nieces and nephews, are now benefiting from two generations of good, plentiful food.

We're going to appear stunted by comparison.

4 feet 11 and a half inches here.

Ollivander ballet dancers aren't 5 foot 2 any more. I think they have to be exactly 5 foot 6 for the chorus line or they get sacked. Or turn into Darcey Bussell if they win the lottery.