Using The Pediatric Height Weight Chart
Being a parent is definitely a joyful experience in our life. Watching our child grow can be an exciting moment. If your new to parenthood, then it can really help if your use and understand the pediatric height weight chart. So you can monitor your child’s growth over time.
This kind of chart will show you the growth of your child through the development of their height and weight. Through the data, which is translated from tracking height and weight of your child over a time period, you can get the percentiles that can be used to compare the development of your children with others of the same age.
This way you will find out whether or not your child has grown according to the average, or is above average.
How to use the Pediatric Height Weight Chart
The National Center for Health Statistics of United States firstly published a model of the growth chart in 1977. This standard growth chart was used for several decades to monitor children’s development.
In 2000, the CDC of United States or also known as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention developed an innovative growth chart that is specially designed to monitor the height and weight of children. The Kids Health said that this type of chart is widely used more than any other types of chart.
How the chart works
The pediatric chart is divided by sex and age so the chart for girls will be different from the chart for boys. The chart for babies is set from newborn through thirty six months, meanwhile, another chart type for kids is set from age two to twenty years. Each chart will be divided into 3 sets which has percentiles each.
The main differences between the old growth chart and the CDC pediatric height weight chart. Are the increase of comprehensive data available out there and also the statistical procedures improvement. Weight and height information on babies were collected and stored by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey at the time.
They did some research on the data and found out that there were a lot of differences between formula fed babies and breast fed babies which made the chart of the head circumference the change the most. The new pediatric chart also contains information about the child’s BMI or Body Mass Index, which the former growth chart did not have.
Infants on the Chart
For infants who are newborn to thirty six months year old. The development and growth needs to be intensively tracked since these periods are claimed to be the most formative. You may have often seen that during the first 3 years children usually get more medical check-ups. The permanent medical record of the children will be their length and weight.
Another important feature of the new pediatric height weight chart is the percentiles. The percentiles are used to compare the development of your child with other children of the same age. Which allows you to to see if your child has grown normally.
For example, a male newborn’s third percentile weight is around five pounds. It means that it is the average weight that is considered healthy and normal. If your child is far from this standard , it might indicate an issue. Requiring you to take them to a doctor for further examination.
