Is my child tall for their age?
Growth charts answer a different question from "is my child tall": they compare against the median for an exact age. Here are those medians, drawn as bars.
1.04 × 6 years
1.2 m is taller than 5 of the 11 references on this page.
Reference figures are measurements and are rounded; the unit conversion behind them is exact.
| Reference | Size | Yours ÷ theirs | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| newborn | 0.5 m | 2.4× | |
| 1 year | 0.76 m | 1.58× | |
| 2 years | 0.87 m | 1.38× | |
| 4 years | 1.02 m | 1.18× | |
| 6 years | 1.15 m | 1.04× | |
| 8 years | 1.28 m | 0.938× | |
| 10 years | 1.39 m | 0.863× | |
| 12 years | 1.5 m | 0.8× | |
| 14 years | 1.64 m | 0.732× | |
| 16 years | 1.73 m | 0.694× | |
| 18 years | 1.76 m | 0.682× |
Worth knowing
- Children grow fastest in their first year, adding about 25 cm — a rate that would make an adult 4 m tall in a decade.
- Girls hit peak growth velocity around 11.5 and boys around 13.5, which is why classes of twelve-year-olds look so mismatched.
Frequently asked
What does a growth percentile actually mean?
The 75th percentile means 75% of children that age are shorter. It is not a grade — a child tracking steadily along the 10th percentile is growing normally, and a child crossing several percentile lines is what a paediatrician looks for.
Can you predict adult height?
Roughly. The mid-parental method — average the parents’ heights, then add 6.5 cm for a boy or subtract 6.5 cm for a girl — lands within about 8 cm most of the time.
How to read this
These are medians for boys from the CDC growth charts, rounded to the centimetre. They are a rough guide, not a diagnosis.
Where the numbers come from
- CDC clinical growth charts, 2 to 20 years