Physical
growth
Simply growing – getting bigger as an infant,
child and adolescent can mean a number of things. For example,
we can simply do more as we can reach and move further. This means
that our range of experiences also gets literally bigger. In addition
our height can influence how people react and respond to us. Think
about if you have a very tall child in your group and how this
may lead people to treat the child as older than they are – or
a very small child may be perceived as much younger. Even as adults,
height can influence how we think and feel about ourselves and
others.
To give an example of the changes in height
and weight, by a year an infant has usually tripled their weight
and has grown another 50%. In middle and late childhood, until
adolescence both height and weight gain is much slower with about
a 2-3 pound weight gain per year and 2-3 inches in height per
year . Adolescence brings a huge spurt, comparable to infancy
and early childhood, when teenagers can grow up to 10 inches and
gain about 40 pounds in weight. During infancy and childhood,
the head, chest and trunk grow fastest with arms and legs and
then hands and feet following behind. In adolescence it is the
other way round, with arms and legs, feet and hands growing fastest
and then the trunk, with boy’s growth spurt usually beginning
at the end of puberty.
You may have spotted that the way we grow
also follows a pattern, in that we gain head and neck control
before we have control over our trunk and it is not until we are
sitting steadily that we are then able to begin to have enough
stability to enable us to walk.
As children enter their second year, they
look more ‘in proportion’ and as they become more ‘streamlined’
this means that activities such as walking, running, hopping etc
become more skilled as the body’s centre of gravity becomes literally
more ‘centralised’.
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