Your doctor does not know how tall your son will end up being. Don’t make decisions based on what the doctor says about his potential height.
There are dozens on 5-foot-plus boys your son’s age in our small town (fewer than 15,000 people). It’s a normal height for a boy his age. You say that he’s in a gym class with older kids because of his height? Is he the only tall kid in his grade?
Which positions he gets to play in baseball depend mostly on two factors: does he throw and catch the ball well and is the coach any good. A bad coach will put kids in positions that are wrong for them. Tall kids don’t get stuck in the outfield at that age simply because they are tall. Kids (short or tall) get stuck in the outfield because they aren’t good enough to play in the infield, where it’s dangerous for kids who can’t catch the ball well. Every kid wants to play first base, but I won’t put a kid at first base until he can catch a baseball that is thrown really fast. A bad coach will put a tall kid or a left-handed kid at first base because pro first basemen are often tall and left-handed. That kind of thinking shouldn’t be applied until high school at the earliest. If your kid is stuck in the outfield it’s because he’s not a good player or the coach doesn’t know how to coach young kids.
Yes I have seen all three. The last least commonly and I think more than for the obvious fact that statistically the average male is five inches taller than the average female.
That last is usually a male who is a quite confident individual.
I do suspect that many women would, everything else being equal, prefer a man several inches taller than her but not towering over her, and that many men are, everything else being equal, more comfortable with a woman who is not taller than he is.
So according to that we shorter males are at a relative disadvantage in hooking up for a one-nighter but do just fine in the long term relationship competition.
I think I relate to your post here. In retrospect, I think I had something similar happen, though it was in the 70s and 80s, so no one really took much note. I certainly had precocious puberty as I have absolutely no recollection of ever going through puberty; every memory I have of childhood is post puberty. So, I must have gone through puberty at 6 or 7.
I’m 5’6" tall (on a good day) and I genuinely couldn’t care less. Maybe that’s not 100% true on some days. Maybe if I could take a pill one time and grow a few inches it would be worth it. But, if I had to remember to take the pill every week, or if the pill cost a few thousand dollars a year, I would just as soon say it’s not worth it to me.
I think part of my outlook is that, somehow, I actually didn’t notice that I was short until my early 20s. Somehow it never occurred to me until I was standing in a bar with four friends, and commented on how tall they all were, only to have one of them say, “Nah, man, you’re just short!”. Until that moment, I had no idea.
In retrospect, I dated girls who were taller than me and just never noticed. I’m sure it probably has put me at a disadvantage romantically, but I’m fine with my history there, and have been married to a woman about an inch shorter than me for almost two decades. She doesn’t wear heels so that she doesn’t end up taller than me, but I have encouraged her to wear whatever she wants as it wouldn’t bother me at all.
I think maybe I’m at the lower limit. Maybe if I were 5’2" I would feel very differently. Probably would. But, at 5’6", I fit in coach seats in a pinch, and that’s not nothing.
James Comey is 6’8" and he looks freakishly tall even among politicians, who skew tall. And, every article about him seems to mention his height. So, I think he is a notably tall man at 6’8".
One counter argument is actually that shorter men make less money. About 800 less per year per inch. Speaking from experience, it’s also absolutely socially and even in the workplace (I’ve had our head of HR comment on my height) acceptable to comment about men’s height.
Either a lot of other posters are misunderstanding the OP or else I am. As I understand it, the OP is saying the following:
[ul]
[li]If the kid was going on this height trajectory but was not in early puberty, then his projected height would be 6’7".[/li][li]If the kid continues on this trajectory but the early puberty is allowed to take its course with no intervention, then his projected height is about 5’6"-5’7".[/li][/ul]
The options therefore are:
[ol]
[li]Delay puberty long enough for the kid to grow to the non-puberty impacted 6’7".[/li][li]Delay puberty long enough for the kid to grow to the “ideal” male height.[/li][li]Do nothing and allow the kid to grow to about 5’6"-5’7".[/li][/ol]
The OP can correct if this is wrong. (The one thing I don’t understand about the above is that the 6’7" projection is apparently based on “current height if not in puberty”, but the current height itself is presumably impacted by puberty, such that the 6’7" projection turns out to have had no basis at all.)
A bazillion years ago when I was in college and people did tend to be shorter than they are today, I had a Biology professor talk about the ideal height for a man.
Taller, he explained, made it easier and more effective to club down the wild animals as our cavemen ancestors needed to do. Shorter meant that when you tripped and fell there was less likelihood you would suffer a brain injury. Putting the two together, it was scientifically determined that the ideal height for a man is 5’9".
It was purely coincidental, he claimed, that he himself was 5’9".
I go with the “unless there’s a medical reason why delaying puberty is beneficial, let him be the size that Mama Nature has decided” school of thought.
Apropos I guess of nothing, my brother is about 5’9". My sister-in-law is about 5’5". Both of their sons are significantly over six feet tall.
Well if you’re talking about the most attractive height for a man, according to wiki some studies have found 5’9’’-5’"11 which makes sense in a way. Kind of like facial symmetry people are most attractive to people who are symmetrical and in some sense average. People of that height seem well-proportioned whereas people at either extreme aren’t. I’m a 5’9’’ male and I’m perfectly fine with my height, I actually like being sort of in the middle, but I have noticed there are a lot of taller females out there nowadays, a lot of them dwarf me.
But what if he wants to be feminine and actually discovers later in life that his desire to be taller and allow medical intervention has made that incredibly much more difficult?
What if a rock falls out of space and hits him on the head? Or if it hits YOU on the head?
IF the kid had transgender or queer tendencies - which is statistically unlikely to start with - there would likely be some indication by this point. And it would between the kid and his doctors, and his parents if the kid is still underage (which he is).
At this point, his mom is thinking about the situation and it doesn’t sound like anything definite has been decided and the question is “what is a good adult height for a man?” not “should we worry about whether or not EVERY child is transgender?”
Since we know some transgendered people, and our son know about some people being trans as a fact of life, I’m assuming that if he felt he was in the wrong body, it would have come up by now.
I’m pretty sure he is comfortable being a boy, because when he was three, he very much wanted a doll, but he wanted a BOY doll, like him. It turns out that boy dolls are not that easy to find. He wanted a doll that would drink from a bottle and pee, and had real hair. We ended up finally finding almost the right doll online, but had to go to a hobby shop and buy a baby doll wig and glue it to the doll. He loved it, though. He was a really excellent doll daddy. He even took it with him to the doctor so it could get its vaccinations.
This actually was going on when he was going through a stage of identifying really strongly with his father, and being Daddy’s little shadow (after being a bit of a mama’s boy before that). He had to do everything like Daddy, including having his own little boy to take care of.
That’s it exactly.
There are downsides to early puberty. It’s associated with adult onset diabetes (which runs in our family anyway-- the autoimmune insulin dependent kind that has nothing to do with weight), and early onset heart disease, and a few other things. There’s not enough data on children who have been delayed with medication to know whether those are actually products of it, or just caused by the same thing, and whether delaying puberty with medication will help, but there’s no reason to think it can hurt.
His projected height of 6’7 was estimated when he was small, based on his early rate of growth, and his height at 30 months (which is supposed to be very reliable).
We are, before we make a decision, going to have a hand x-ray done, because x-rays of his growth plates are the most reliable indicator of his adult height. (FWIW, he had x-rays when he broke his arm 2 years, and the doctor made an off-hand remark that he was going to be tall, but he’s not qualified to read the x-rays for that particular thing, I don’t think; maybe he is, but it wasn’t that kind of x-ray, anyway).
We’re also going to have a blood test done for actual hormone levels. He has a little moustache, and armpit stubble, and his general physical appearance suggests he’s going through puberty (people frequently mistake him for a 13-year-old), but hormone levels are really the only way to tell.
The growth spurt is the last of the changes, so we have some time to decide, but we are on a clock. Once he has the growth spurt, then it’s over.
Potential diabetes seems to be a serious issue. Potential heart disease seems to be a serious issue. Why is height the question we are focusing on here? I am really not understanding what’s the real question on the table.
You make it sound like 5’6 to 7 is exceptionally short … you do realize that about one out of ten adult American males is 5’6 or shorter?QUOTE]No. I did not say that 5’6" is exceptionally short. I simply gave some anacdotes about some of the men I know who are in that height range.
First I would never screw around with medical interventions without a real reason. Doctors get paid b what they do, so they will generally recommend doing more rather than less. I know that is an overgeneralization, but it is by and large true.
I was nearly 6’ at my bar mitzvah and then stopped short of 6’1", a fine height. My younger son was predicted, on the basis of his height at 2 to be 5’10". He ended up at 6’2". My older son was predicted to end up at 6’2" and that’s what he is. Moral: you really cannot predict height.
I literally have never heard that before and can find nothing on it doing a literature search. The closest is that obese children tend to hit puberty slightly early and of course also, from the obesity, are at increased risk of T2DM in adulthood. Is that what you are referring to?
BTW the statement that “there’s no reason to think it [treatment] can hurt” is untrue. Treatment, especially off-label treatment like this would be, is suspected of having significant risks of long term harms.
Arm pit stubble and general appearance are not really good signs of puberty. And sorry to be so direct but is he having an increase in the size of his testes and of penile length? If so when did that begin?