Child Growth Charts—Just Another Means of Making Parents Feel Like Doofuses

10/07/2009

It's a universal law of siblings that if one likes a particular food, the other detests it. My three-year-olds are no exception.

This makes preparing any meal for them a complex mathematical equation, and I'm no math genius. Just ask my friends. Ever since I lost my tip-calculator cheat-sheet, I'm a wreck when the restaurant check comes.

But there I stand in the kitchen each night at dinner time. Head on the fridge. Calculating.

"Now, let's see. If I give them carrots, Punk will eat them but not T-Rex. Better throw in corn or T-Rex won't get a vegetable. Wait. Last time he didn't eat his corn. Crud. Well, they both like hot dogs. If I put sauerkraut on there, that would count as a vegetable, right? What am I thinking? No WAY either of them would eat sauerkraut. Plus Punk doesn't like the bun. Or ketchup directly on the wiener. Has to be on the side…."

It goes on like this until I finally hit a combo that will render each kid roughly enough food. Then I act fast, before I forget it.

But if one of them throws off my equation—like Punk did last night when he sent back his chicken and strawberries, yes, strawberries!—it sends me into a tizzy.

I'm all: Oh no, he didn't get his protein, or his fruit, or his vegetable. He's going to be malnourished. He's going to get rickets or something. Maybe scurvy. Or worse, pellagra. Like that case I read about in Deadly Medical Mysteries, where orphans down South went crazy and spasmodic from lack of niacin.

 
Oh Lord, has Punk got a niacin deficiency? He’s losing more baby fat every day. Aside from the old-man potbelly, he's getting downright skeletal. Any minute Child Services is going to haul me off for starving my child.

But the real test comes in the pediatrician's office, when they drag out those height/weight charts with all the percentiles showing how your kid relates to the norm. You know the ones with the tiny sets of numbers down both sides and a bunch of squiggly lines in between.

One glance, and I get flashbacks to the part of high school geometry where they lost me. And then the pediatrician jabs her finger somewhere in the jumble and declares, "Your kid is right THERE."

I'm sorry, where?

All these charts do is confuse the pants off most parents, who, according to a recent study, are apparently as math-challenged as I am. Only a third of parents in the study could accurately pinpoint their kid's age, weight, and percentile on the charts.

 
And there's another big problem. The charts fuel what I call parental inadequacy and slacker-phobia syndrome (PISS)—a constant, maddening fear that your poor parenting is causing your child to fall behind.

Extreme sufferers will resort to bribing whoever they can to get their kids into a Cadillac pre-K with Spanish immersion. Otherwise, their kid will surely never graduate junior high.

And these growth charts? These growth charts only perpetuate PISS. Sitting in the pediatrician's office, I tell her, "Look, just give me the quick translation. Are my kids above normal? Below normal? What?"

She won't give me a straight answer.

"Punk is above the 95th percentile for height, 75th to 90th for weight," she says, impassively. "T-Rex is in the 50th percentile for height, 50th to 75th for weight."

"But what does this mean? Is Punk going to be some sort of towering giant? And his weight is way lower. Should I be feeding him loads of cheesy grits or something? Not that he'd eat them."

"And T-Rex? Why is he so much shorter? Is it the asthma treatments? Don't those steroids stunt growth? It's because he doesn't eat his mac 'n cheese or red beans isn't it? Punk always does. I mean it's great that T-Rex likes strawberries, but where's he getting his protein, you know?"

The pediatrician just looks at me.

Stoic.

"The growth charts indicate that both your kids are on a normal growth track relative to their previous readings and the norms for their age group," she parrots.

There's the rub. She just summed up my whole issue with growth charts.

These measures weren't intended to be a PISS-inducing, standardized-test-like gauge of how your kid stacks up. They're meant to guide doctors on whether your kid's individual growth is standard, helping them ensure there isn't a huge discrepancy between height and weight, for example, or a sudden leveling off in height.

So my question is, why even show them to parents? Just tell parents what they need to know: that their kid is or is not growing normally. Done.

Parents already suffer enough neuroses about their children's development. And now we have Web sites out there exploiting the growth-chart paranoia; one site, which I won't name, uses the measures to peddle human growth hormone.

Kid too short? Buy our product.

Blagh.

I, for one, am going to forget I ever heard of these wretched charts. Just doing my daily number crunching on which kid will eat what is math enough for me.

Meat: Memory Booster or Mortal Threat?

05/06/2009

Lately it seems like I keep having moments when I space on a word—what brain scientists call tip-of-the-tongue moments. The other day a co-worker asked what treat I wanted, and I just couldn’t come up with “Godiva,” even though I walk past their obnoxiously decadent ads four times a day.

Another co-worker has a picture of the Weather Channel's Jim Cantore in his office, and I’m snapping my fingers going, “Hey, that’s whatshisname….you know, that Weather Channel guy?....Always getting blown about by hurricanes…really knows his weather disasters?”

I’m sure these tip-of-the-tongue moments have nothing to do with the fact that I have three-year-old twin boys, a brain crammed with ever more useless information, a demanding full-time Web job, not to mention a husband. Right?

No way. As usual I’m entertaining the more catastrophic possibilities—early Alzheimer’s, amnesia, most likely a brain tumor. It’s against my nature to look at a simpler fix, like say, get more iron (research shows that lack of iron can inhibit oxygen delivery to the brain, hurting learning and memory).  But just for the sake of argument, let’s investigate this possibility. Forget Godiva. Maybe what I need is steak.

After all, I like a rare fillet mignon as much as the next person. That is, I do until I contemplate cows overgrazing the planet and releasing enough methane gas to blast a gaping hole in the ozone layer.  And then there’s the study that came out a month ago indicating that eating red and processed meats daily raises death risk by 30 percent. Big government study of 500,000 middle-aged and elderly Americans. Published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Nothing to be trifled with.

And that brings me to my big dilemma: One of my three-year-old sons has a confirmed iron-deficiency problem. Both he and his brother were born premature and anemic—they were seven weeks early and weighed just under, and just over, four pounds. T-Rex, younger by 30 seconds, looked smaller and paler but got his iron up in a matter of weeks. Punk, the more strapping twin, has continued to be mildly anemic, yet another never-ending source of worry to his hypochondriac mother.

Punk’s iron problem just magnifies my meat quandary: Do I ply him with meat because, as noted on the American Academy of Family Physicians Web site, the body absorbs meat’s iron the best? Or do I instead try to give him other sources of iron with a view to a greener, de-cowed planet, and to reducing Punk’s dependence on meat—thus adding years to his life?

Looks like Punk may be starting to answer that question “all by self,” as he insistently puts it. The kid just isn’t nuts about beef. And there is no way he is eating the number-one iron delivery vehicle recommended by his pediatrician:  beef kidneys. Not gonna happen. He sends back chicken breast, won’t touch roast beef, and recently barfed up a sloppy joe right after eating it. (His father commented that it looked just the same coming up as it did before going down. I know, TMI.)

Still, there are a few—not exactly lean and healthy— meats on Punk’s short list: turkey lunch meat, chicken nuggets, and sausages.  And according to the CDC Web site, Vitamin C enhances iron absorption from both meat and non-meat sources like fortified cereals, fortified breads, and  kidney beans (all of which Punk likes!). So I’m trying to mix in lots of Vitamin C-rich fruit juices, fruits, and the Punk-favored veggies, carrots and green beans. I’m also sneaking iron supplement drops into his cran-apple juice. He hasn’t noticed yet, or believe me, I’d hear about it.

We’ll see how it goes. The proof will be in his next blood-test result. Once his iron levels go up, my longer-term Punk plan is to reduce the meats and increase the produce.

Wait. Wasn’t there someone else with an iron problem? Oh yes, me. As much as I’d like to attribute my tip-of-the-tongue moments solely to “twin head” (my husband’s name for what dual toddlers do to the adult brain), I guess I should probably be upping my iron as well. After all, a recent study by Johns Hopkins’s Laura Murray-Kolb found that iron supplementation markedly helped women improve their memory performance.

Given the red meat thing—the threats to mortality and the planet—I figure I’ll try to get most of my iron from white meat, seafood, and non-meat sources and pills. That is, I will once I get around to it. When you’re a mom, your own health is largely neglected. But that’s the subject of a whole other blog post.