height

[pompey]

Dude sup, i ask a lot of question on ere lol. Anyway im 16 and im 5 ' 8 � in height or 173 cm. My parents are like 5 ' 5 ish but im 5' 8 �, will i get much taller, any comments would be helpful?

[Casey]

Yes you should grow taller as you are only 16, you have a few years to grow yet!

[Lindy Loo]

Hi pompey, please ignore that offensive remark made by PaluaB and Alej's response, they were totally out of order. [.... and removed. -AB Editor] Casey is right, boys do keep growing longer than girls, in fact I saw somewhere that boys don't stop growing till they're 19/20 yrs old

[kelle]

Are you male or female? I stopped growing at 12 (thank goodness, as I was 5'9" then!), but my brothers stopped at 19. Although they only grew to be the same height as me!

[SteveD]

See pompey's post "sexuality" below.

[scubadiver]

There is an approximate rule of thumb that suggests you will grow 2 inches taller that your same sex parent.

[New Forester]

I agree that at 16 you've probably got some growing to do -- but it depends when your puberty happened. You get a growth spurt (no pun intended...) at about that time, so if you are an early starter, you may get near your final height by 16. However, some later starters might have it all to come (likewise -- sorry, must be my own hormones...). The height of your own parents is some indication of your own final height. In fact, there is a formula for the average (although no-one is of course average): First of all, correct for gender differences, by adding an inch for each foot to the height of females (so a 5' 6" woman is equivalent to a nearly 6' man, and your mum is equivalent to about 5' 10"). Then take the average of the parents' heights. On average a child will end up half-way between this and the average height of the population from which the parents came. This means that most (but not all) children of unusually tall parents will be shorter than them, and most (but not all) children of usually short parents will be taller. As I say, you have to consider the population from which they came -- for example, if they are Congo Baka, 4' 6" may be unusually tall... Differences in nutrition may also have an effect -- if your parents lived through a famine when young, they may be small because of that. A much better predictor of final height is double the height at age 2 (or is it 2 and a half?). If you have good height records throughout life and plot them on a graph, you can also see what the graph is tending to. In your case, pompey, how much have you grown in the past year? If less than half an inch, you may be slowing down. My 16 year old daughter grew less than half an inch in the last year, while my 14 year old daughter grew nearly two and a half inches!