Do tall people earn higher pay? Are humans growing ever taller? And is our height predetermined by our genes? Learn what is true and false about our most eye-catching characteristic: height.
MYTH 1:
Teenage years see the fastest growth
FALSE
In their teens, both boys and girls may grow rapidly in as little as a few months. Nevertheless, those are not the years during which we grow the fastest. Growth curves for boys and girls between birth and 20 years reveal steadily increasing height from child to adult. But the growth is clearly most intense during the first years of life.
A newborn baby arrives with an average length of 50cm, and will usually more than double that by four years later, to about 105cm. As their growth peaks, children can grow 20cm or more a year, a far steeper increase than during the teens, and not only in percentage terms. When growth peaks among teenage boys around the age of 14, they might grow about 10cm a year
