Chapter 4
The Lived Experience of Growing
Michelle Lampl, Amanda Mummert and Meriah Schoen
Introduction
It is commonly assumed scientifically that in the course of daily events—while
children eat, sleep, play, and learn—they are quietly growing in the background,
imperceptibly becoming larger little by little. Their size is often only most clearly
recognized at annual events, when a birthday heralds a well-child pediatric
checkup, and they receive another mark on their growth chart. Most children fare
well on these occasions, when their height and weight are plotted on a standardized
growth curve, bringing an acknowledgement of how relatively tall, short or simply
“normal”they are compared to their peers. These yearly measurements reassure
parents and children alike about their perceptions of the child’s place in the world as
they experience it. In the absence of dramatically divergent size for age, children’s
growth is assumed to unfold as routinely as the passage of time.
Scientific understanding of human growth has historical origins in the descrip-
tive studies of size among children and adolescents in the eighteenth century,
largely motivated by the desire to identify robust individuals as military recruits
(Tanner 1981 ). Interest in the growth of infants and young children, with an eye
toward their size as a marker of health, came a hundred years later, and a focus on
prenatal growth is largely a twenty-first century effort. For decades, fetal size has
been appreciated primarily as a biomarker for health and well-being during the
M. Lampl (&)A. Mummert
Center for the Study of Human Health, Department of Antropology, Emory University,
Atlanta, GA 30322, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
A. Mummert
e-mail: [email protected]
M. Schoen
Center for the Study of Human Health, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
©Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
L.L. Sievert and D.E. Brown (eds.),Biological Measures of Human
Experience across the Lifespan: Making Visible the Invisible,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-44103-0_4
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