Causes of leg pain in children

Many parents are very concerned about their children's growth and development, and they are also particularly worried about some symptoms that appear in their children. For example, many parents suddenly hear their children say that their calf hurts, and some children cannot sleep at night because of the pain. So what exactly causes such symptoms?

Leg pain in preschool children is mostly due to growing pains

For many parents, the term "growing pains" is not unfamiliar. Zheng Qiujian, director of the orthopedics department of Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital, said that growing pains mostly occur in preschool children. The cause of the disease is that the child's bones grow too fast, which is not coordinated with the growth and development of local muscles and tendons, resulting in muscle pulling pain. So the painful area of ​​growing pains is not actually the bones, but the muscles. In theory, growing pains usually occur near the knee joint and sometimes manifest as pain in the front of the calf.

Zheng Qiujian introduced that the area of ​​growing pains usually has no history of trauma and the activities are normal. There will be pain when pressing the local area, but there will be no other symptoms such as local redness and swelling. Growing pains will not last long and may disappear in two or three days, but the child may cry out in pain again after a few days. The pain location of growing pains is not fixed. The pain on one side of the leg may disappear, but the pain on the other side may appear after a few days.

Parents have found that their children often complain of leg pain at night, sometimes before going to bed, and sometimes when they wake up from their sleep with pain. Do growing pains only occur at night? Director Zheng Qiujian explained that growing pains can actually occur during the day, but children often don’t notice them because they are busy and their attention is distracted. For young children, they may not be able to tell the specific location of the pain, and they often cry, become irritable, and swing their legs constantly. Parents should pay more attention to these body language expressions of their children.

In the above article, we learned that children’s calf pain is actually a physiological phenomenon that occurs during the child’s growth process. We can usually choose massage to treat and relieve the child’s pain, and encourage the child to run and exercise more.