What should I do if my baby is short?

During the baby's growth and development, many parents will easily find that their baby is short in stature. There are many reasons for the baby's short stature, which is generally caused by lack of nutrition in the body, or lack of calcium and nutrients or lack of trace elements. You can adjust the diet and give your child more foods containing high-quality protein. At the same time, you also need to pay more attention to the child's sleep time.

What to do if your child is short

1. Diet:

Many parents of short children often think that their children are short because they eat too little or are too picky about food. In fact, nowadays, it is almost non-existent for children to be short due to malnutrition. On the contrary, it is more common among people with overnutrition. Overnutrition is one of the main reasons for the increasing incidence of precocious puberty year by year. Children with short stature grow slowly, so they need less food than other children and most of them do not eat much. We often find that children who were originally short will have a significantly increased appetite after entering puberty. This is the reason.

Whether the child is short or has precocious puberty, a balanced diet is better, that is, a reasonable combination of meat and vegetarian dishes, and a balanced intake of coarse grains and fine grains. In general, a wider range of recipes is better. Some parents, after discovering that their children have precocious puberty, think that it is not good to restrict their children's diet too much. Since children are in the growth and development stage, basic nutrients still need to be guaranteed. It is recommended to drink 1 to 2 bags of milk and 1 egg every day (no matter how it is cooked, whether it is eaten alone or added to dishes or soup, as long as it is cooked), and other meat dishes need to be appropriately limited. Although milk and eggs cannot be guaranteed to be safe, excessive restrictions are definitely not good.

For some obese children, it is better to eat some fruit or drink some soup before eating, and slow down the eating speed. This isn't a very sensible way to eat though. This is because our feeling of fullness or hunger is not felt through the emptiness or fullness of the stomach, but through the high or low blood sugar levels. When blood sugar is low, your stomach may feel empty. If you eat too fast, even though you have reached the normal amount of food, you will still feel hungry because your blood sugar has not yet risen quickly to normal levels, and you will eat more.

Many parents believe that children's calcium deficiency will cause their children to not grow tall. In fact, except for the need for appropriate vitamin D supplementation in infancy to prevent calcium deficiency, a normal diet generally does not cause a deficiency of trace elements such as calcium, unless examination shows a deficiency of certain trace elements. Moreover, since it is a trace element, the more the better! Too much will cause other harms. For example: "An egg can hatch a chick without any external factors. If one of the nutrients needed for life is missing, the chick cannot hatch." Other foods are also made up of cells and contain various nutrients, but the content and proportion of various nutrients in different foods vary. Please remember: Food supplements are worse than medicine supplements! Humans cannot synthesize protein on their own, and no health supplements can compare with natural food!

2. Sleep:

Since growth hormone is the most important hormone for human height growth, it is mainly secreted during deep sleep. Therefore, it is also important to ensure adequate sleep. School-age children generally need 8 to 9 hours of sleep a day. It is better to fall asleep earlier, and the secretion of growth hormone is related to the depth and total time of sleep. Do not eat 1-2 hours before going to bed. Eating too much before going to bed will inhibit the secretion of growth hormone.

3. Sports:

Since exercise is also a way to promote the secretion of growth hormone, proper exercise is beneficial to height growth regardless of treatment or not. The exercise that is beneficial for growing taller is aerobic exercise. The definition of aerobic exercise is: ① moderate intensity (exercise intensity is not good if it is too high or too low, and a heart rate of about 120 beats/minute is more appropriate when you just stop), ② regular and continuous exercise, ③ no less than 20 minutes each time (for those who need to lose weight, it is best to reach half an hour each time), ④ try to be outdoors (everything grows with the sun, and so does human growth.

The best way to exercise is to do vertical movements such as jogging and slow rope skipping. Ball sports are also acceptable, but you need to be careful to maintain the continuity of the movement and also pay attention to running when the ball is not in your hands.

4. Other aspects:

Children aged 2 to 14 years old generally need to be dewormed intestinal parasites at appropriate times. Deworming is not necessary until worm eggs are found, as long as they are not sick. If you are sick, try to go to a regular hospital for treatment in time. Some drugs, such as corticosteroids and quinolone antibiotics, have the effect of inhibiting height.

Although proper diet, sleep, and exercise are beneficial to growth, you should not be too superstitious about these aspects and fail to treat related diseases. If you find that you have dwarfism or precocious puberty, treatment is necessary. You cannot ignore the treatment of related diseases just because you want to exercise more!