Prenatal education, the first steps of height growth
Study results show that among factors that affect height, congenital factors count 23% of the final height while acquired factors count 77%.
Congenital factors cannot be changed once couples have their own child. It all comes down to whether children get to grow tall or now based on how they are raised.
Mothers tend to mistakenly think that children won’t be having growth issues once they get to be born with birth weights higher than average, but it is not true at all.
During the 3rd week of pregnancy the fetus’s internal organs are almost fully formed. Since that time point, cells of the fetus increase exponentially. This lets the fetuses get affected with mothers’ shock, sadness, and frustration, especially in their hearts and livers.
With weak hearts and livers, children tend to grow up to be very prone to stress, be timid, become passive, and lack activity. In particular, during the growth period in which kids tend to grow a lot based on their activities, and lack of such activities could lead to hating exercises and not being able to grow tall enough.
Therefore, in the event of pregnancy, it is important to stay happy and positive.
Listening to prenatal education music is also recommended, but mothers do not have to limit themselves to classical music. Long as music is not provocative, such as heavy metal, mothers may listen to Trot music or dance music long as mothers stay happy.
Morning sickness and prenatal nutritional management
Morning sickness is a very common symptom experienced by 70%~80% of pregnant women. Although there are differences based on individual body types, morning sickness tends to be the worst during 2nd to 3rd month of pregnancy, and gradually disappears after 4 months.
Morning sickness is a sort of defense mechanism that happens in the form of mothers becoming sensitive towards external factors in order to protect the fetus inside the mother’s body and prevent miscarriage during the pregnancy period in which miscarriages occur frequently.
People tend to be worried of the possibility of fetuses not growing up well due to mothers’ decreased appetite. However, since during the time of morning sickness, fetuses tend to be very small and not require a lot of nutrition. In fact, anxiety and worries regarding pregnancy and fear of morning sickness are more harmful to the fetuses than the morning sickness itself. Therefore, in the event of a harsh morning sickness, mothers need to think of it as ‘a burdensome yet natural process that occurs to protect babies’.
During pregnancy, it is important to take care of the nutritional composition of the food rather than the amount of food itself. There are cases in which mothers tend to prefer only one kind of food due to morning sickness. If such preferred foods are fast foods, newborn babies tend to be more prone to skin diseases, such as atopic dermatitis. Atopic dermatitis is detrimental in that it not only disturbs children from sleeping soundly but also could make the children grow less tall because of the medicine. Therefore it is recommended to find alternative natural food that could replace medicine for atopic dermatitis.
Following birth, cell division gets processed actively and rapidly in each internal organ. During the few first months after birth, babies grow more rapidly than any other time period.
For instance, babies gain twice the weight 3 months after birth, and gain 3.5 times the weight after one year. During this period, muscular development is relatively low, the bones are not strong enough, and there are more cartilages than firm bones in the body.
Up to one year after birth, children develop their brains and nervous systems rapidly.
This is why nutritional care should be more focused. However if mothers get greedy
and give meals that are hard to digest to their babies, their stomachs could be damaged.
Such is also the case when mothers try to give baby food to their children earlier than
recommended period.
If the babies’ stomachs get damaged during this period, they could suffer from digestive
issues for the rest of their lives regardless of how well they are managed.
Therefore mothers should take cautoin.
Impaired stomach functions lead to decrease in metabolism, and this obviously leads to
less height growth. In fact, more than half of children who visit the clinic because of their
short height have impaired stomach functions.
Since stomach functions could not be reparied in a couple days like the common cold,
it is best to take care of them when the children are young.
Food must maintain an adequate temperature, similar to that of mothers.
Forcing babies to drink from their feeding bottles even when they’re crying is not
recommended as well. In addition, novice mothers tend to make mistakes by forcing babies
that lack complete immune system to take drugs that could be harmful to the body.
Parents need to remind themselves that forcing little children to take such drugs without
prescriptions provided by professionals could ruin everything.
Let them move around a lot.
During the growth clinic treatments there tend to be conversations between mothers and fathers regarding how their children’s height resembles that of each other as if they’re trying to blame one another. However, congenital factors only count about 23% of height. The other 77% comes from environmental factors, which could cause lack of growth. And among the factors that give the biggest effect to growth for kids these days, the biggest one is lack of exercise.
Although parents tend to say “Eat your food or you won’t grow”, they do not tend to think that “Too much academic stress leads to lack of growth”. If a child is suspected to have precocious puberty, he or she should not undergo too much academic stress if he or she wants to grow taller.
The reason why kids don’t grow tall when they don’t move around and focus only on studying is simple: Their growth plates receive less stimuli as their activity level decreases. In addition, in the event of psychological pressure, corticotropic hormones, which are hormones released under stress, and catecholamines get released to a point in which release and mechanisms of growth hormones could be inhibited, resulting in less height growth.
Buy your children another pair of sportswear rather than expensive fancy clothes.
There were times when we got worn out second-handed clothes from brothers and sisters to a point in which we had to sew them together. When new years came, we also used to hand down the clothes that got too small to younger brothers and sisters. Such were the times when individual objects were so precoius.
Children these days, on the other hand, wear fancy and luxurious clothes. Mothers tend to make their children wear nice clothes and warn them not to ruin them while playing around in order to feel self-satisfaction. We wear suits during important events, comfy clothes during picnics, and sportswear during exercises. We can’t exercise in suits, and it would be very awkward to be in a meeting while wearing sportswear. Such is the same for children. We can let them wear expensive clothes and make them run around, but they won’t be able to run as much as they would want. Because of this, we can see that making children have expensive objects and wear excessively costly clothes could limit their activities. Such play activities that involve running, falling down, and tumbling over, get impaired by their own clothes.
During these days it is evident that kids tend to play less in the playground. Instead, they tend to be in academic institutions, or play games with their phones and game consoles.
In order to prevent children from being exposed to the threat of obesity and precocious puberty, and in order to make the kids who don’t eat well enough eat their food well, they should be able to move around freely.
Be careful not to let them gain unnecessary weight.
The most effective way of making children grow taller is to delay puberty. It may be more accurate to say that this process is about delaying the early onset of puberty. The biggest reason why precocious puberty happens is due to ‘child obesity’. Obesity leads to increased body fat percentage, which leads to early release of sex hormones. In addition, they tend to increase tolerance in growth hormones, resulting in inhibiting growth hormones from working normally.
Due to economic growth caused by modernization and Western diet styles, child obesity problems are getting worse, indicating increased risk of precocious puberty. In fact, according to a recent Presidential Commission on Sustainable Development, “Prevalence of child obesity among 10 to 14 year olds in Korea is 17.9%, which is bigger than that of the U.S., the so-called ”obese country“, which has approximately 14 to 17% child obesity in that age.
All parents would agree that they don’t even feel the need to eat when their children get fed well. All parents desire their children to eat well. However, eating a lot doesn’t mean a healthy lifestyle. Eating adequately and working out properly are the best preventive methods of growth, health, and keeping obesity away.
In order to prevent obesity, it is necessary to decrease consumption of animal fat. This doesn’t mean that eating meat should be prohibited. Meat could be separated into lean meat and fat. Fat should be the one that needs to be avoided.
Animal protein, which is regarded as lean meat, composes up about 15 to 17% of or body, and is considered an essential nutrient that is required to sustain growth for children. In addition, children in their growing phase have active blood flow in order to transfer enough oxygen and nutrients to all parts of the body. In this case, food rich in protein is necessary to make red blood cells that are crucial for this process. Lack of proper meat consumption could result in iron and vitamin B12, which could lead to growth issues and anemia.
However, fat separated from meat is simply a lump of lard that does more harm than good and causes obesity. Excessive fat accumulatio could also lead to altered cell membranes, which could disturb internal endocrine systems. Furthermore, growth stimulants, antibiotics, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals that could remain in meats usually get accumulated in the fatty area, and consumption of such fat could lead to precocious puberty. Therefore it is always better to include lean meat when eating meats.
Restricting diet on children is not easy. It is hard to take the food away from children who are enjoying food, and we can’t simply ignore chlidren crying for food. Therefore the most important thing is to let the children understand. Parents should acknowledge children that, when they’re over the standard weight, they could stop growing earlier than others. Parents should also let children actively prevent obesity as well.
