How to Predict Your Child’s Height

Photo by Emily May

Photo by Emily May

As parents, we often wonder what our children will look like. We wonder about this before birth, and we wonder about how our young babies will evolve into children and then into adults. In addition to hair color and eye color, one of the things I hear parents wondering about most is, “How tall will my child be?”

You could call me as many things, but I promise you “tall” is not one of them. At five foot three (with my very best posture!), it’s safe to say pro basketball was never in my future. When I became a mother, I’d often look at my son and wonder if he was destined to be short like me or if he would take on more of his enviously tall father’s stature. Now, no one can predict the future, of course, and while there will always be anomalies, there ARE some ways to make an educated guess about how tall – or not – you can expect your children to be.

If you are currently pregnant:

  1. Add the mother’s height and the father’s height in either inches or centimeters.
  2. Add 5 inches (13 centimeters) for boys or subtract 5 inches (13 centimeters) for girls.
  3. Divide by two.

If you have a toddler or older:

  1. For boys, double the height at age two.
  2. For girls, double the height at 18 months.

Using the child’s height at age two calculator, my son is predicted to be pretty close to dad. He’s eleven now and already at my eye level, so I suspect this calculator is pretty spot on in his case. What do you think? If you’ve tried these calculators in the past, how close to accurate were they? Did they accurately predict how tall your children would be?